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Hi guys!
I'm currently collecting resources for my indepdentant study this Winter and I need some books with flawed history to use to contrast the good history I want to write about.

I was wondering, since I know it is a common complaint, if people had some very specific examples of this in what they read- things that frustrated you or made you want to head-desk?

If you can include the author, title and page number- that would be great! If it is too vague (like, All the history in Ravenwolf's books!) I might not be able to use it.

Thanks!

I can't site pages for you. However, for your purposes D.J Conway and Laurie Cabot may prove to be goldmines. Every book I have read by the two of them has contained plenty of examples of revisionist history.

It probably wouldn't go amiss to mention the influence of Margaret Murray and her debunked theories on early neo-pagan movements and organizations, and how you can still see it passed on today.

Cabot's 'The Power of the Witch' was pretty bad, if I'm remembering correctly, as was 'The Witch In Every Woman'. Some of the revision in these is on the part of trying to make witchcraft empirically proven, and some of it is Murray-based theology, and some of it is feminist-based male bashing.

For Conway, 'Celtic Magic' remains the one that burns my brain. I can't think of anything useful in the book...it's vile. It's pretty much just eclectic 'Wicca' given a cheap wash of 'oooh Celtic'. It utterly ignores the differences between different nations and pantheons in the Celtic language family, and forces everything into soft poly God and Goddess archetypes. Also lots of witchcraft is Wicca is everything. Just horrid. And her book 'Norse Magic' is pretty much 'Celtic Magic' with the names changed out in places, cookie-cutter style.

Edain McCoy is probably another writer to look at. 'Sabbats: A Witch's Approach to Living the Old Ways' sucks hardcore.
The book suggests that what our ancestors practiced far before us were 'the Sabbats', when they were not thought of in this way; there was no unified universal practice of all 8 holidays within a single culture. The book also implies that ancient cultures thought of deity in a soft poly way, 'God' and 'Goddess', as opposed to being separate deities.

In general, Edain McCoy's scholarship is abysmal. She fails the 'potato test' AND the 'pumpkin test' in her writings, having asserted that ancient Ireland contained both of these crops traditionally, when they were not native to the country and did not appear there until after the discovery of the Americas.

There's the prevalence of a logical error that most neo-pagan authors perpetuate - that if something in one culture is similar to something in another culture, it must make them the SAME thing. The assumption that there is some common root for the similar practices of different cultures at certain
times of year is fallacious, and generally speaking doing deeper research demonstrates that. But many authors are doing research across a very broad surface, and do not bother to do in-depth research.

I have seen several assertions in this current book I would call into doubt: like the Celts celebrating Yule when they did not celebrate solstices or equinoxes, or the Triple Goddess being honoured in old French Christmas carols despite the fact she is a modern construct who first appeared in Graves' The White Goddess. And she asserts that the Lupercalia was the Roman Imbolc, and was a festival where the mating of wolves was observed as a sign of spring! Since the Lupercalia was a rite founded in the early days of Rome that had three tribes of Luperci, or priests of Pan, who gathered at their sacred cave, slaughtered a goat, and then ran through the streets of Rome naked whipping people with the ends of the goatskin for fertility, I think she's totally off-base, and could easily have looked up the actual festival. Instead she chose to try to make a connection where there is none.

You're welcome. smile

Yeah, Ravenwolf makes a lot of the same errors as are in Starhawk's Spiral Dance. 3nodding

It primarily has to do with the age of their particular witchcrafts. Both claim their religions are ancient (Ravenwolf refers to hers as "Wicca", Starhawk doesn't). The basic errors are:

- witchcraft is religion
- witchcraft is an ancient religion
- the prehistoric Europeans were matriarchal
- Christians killed and persecuted Wiccans
- 9 million people were killed "during the burning times"
- Those 9 million people were, or were presumed to be, Wiccans

We have a thread floating around somewhere about some of the issues we came across in the Spiral Dance. As for Ravenwolf, there are essays on her work here, here and here.

About religious witchcraft generally? Thea Sabin's "Wicca for Beginners" is meant to be good, but I haven't read it myself. Cunningham's "Wicca for the Solitary" and "Living Wicca" are pretty good, with the caveat that he is heavily soft-polytheistic and very "love and light" oriented. Anything by Doreen Valiente is good... her history is pretty poor, but she wrote during a time before awareness of how poor particular witchcraft-history sources were was well known, so she gets a bit of a pass there.

As for Wicca, try "The Witches' Bible" by the Farrars and anything by Gerald Gardner. Dorothy Morrison has some good stuff too, apparently.

I don't work with herbs so you'll have to ask someone else on that subject. I do seem to recall warnings against Cunningham's work on the subject. Culpeper's herbal might interesting?

As for the Year and a Day book, quick warning, don't believe anything you read in that thing about runes. I had a flick through once and put the book down angrily when I came across the first rune topic. (That's the only thing I remember about it.)

Buckland's BBB, as you may have gathered, shares some issues with Ravenwolf re: poor history and over-generalisation of the word "witchcraft". Personally I really didn't like it because it has such a hard focus on soft polytheism but it may be more to your tastes.

Gardner did trust him to carry Wicca to the United States, but he had reason to regret that. Many Wiccans consider Buckland an oathbreaker and a person who should not be trusted.



Soft polytheism is, essentially, "all gods are one God, all goddesses are one Goddess". In other words, various deities are considered to be aspects or facets of two over-arching deities. Personally I am a hard polytheist; I believe the gods are individual entities. So when I read a very soft-poly leaning book, it can annoy me to read deities referred to as essentially inter-changeable. There's a lot of that in the BBB. So personally, I found it massively irritating to read. If you're a soft-polytheist yourself I doubt you'll have as many issues with it as I did. It's not a right/wrong thing as such, more a matter of.... not taste, but you know what I mean.



You have to research. The thing is, we all started with no idea what books were good and which were bad. Personally I followed Ravenwolf's work for years because I had just no idea it was shitty. I said really dumb things in Pagan chat rooms and stuff because she said it and I believed it. You have to pick up information as you go and read critically, examine ideas, compare and contrast, and ask around.

For example, personally I'd have no idea that Cunningham's herb book had issues, because I have no experience with that. I've heard from other people who do have a lot of experience with herbs that his work is poor in that area, so I pass that on. They may be wrong and I wouldn't know. As for runes, I research those, so I can tell when a book gets them massively wrong. When I want to look into a subject that's new to me, I ask around people I know who have experience in that area and ask when what books they recommend.

It may well have good reviews - the thing is with Pagan books, most of the reviews are from people who are pretty new to Paganism. They don't have a grounding in the subject so they don't really have any basis on which to judge the validity of the content. They tend to say how it helped them, that it was inspiring and well-written, and that's great as far as it goes, but it means other newbies are told a book is great when the information it contains could be awful. When I want to look into a subject and I don't know anyone who has a focus in that area, I read the one- and two-star reviews on amazon. They tend to be more informative than the five-star reviews, and if people have a problem with a book they mention it. Many also give recommendations of authors who do it better.

None of this is criticism of you - newbies aren't expected to know which books are good and which are crap. The crap ones can be hugely popular and are usually easier to find when it comes to bookstores and libraries. And we were all there once so we know how it goes.

Here's a short-cut for runes: if something mentions a blank rune, you can pretty much discard everything else they say. There is no blank rune. 3nodding