I'm a sucker for magick books marked "postmodern" or "urban" magick, and this was no exception. Originally, I'd walked down to the Borders bookstore looking for a book called Urban Primitive - instead, I found this little number. I picked it up, read the blurb, skimmed through it, whipped out £10.99, and immediately bought it. In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about this venture.
About 66% of the book (published by New Falcon, who brought us somme of Phil Hine's work, as well as Peter Carrol's travesty "Psybermagick") is anecdotal. S. Jason Black spends - let me just count - 67 out of 180-odd pages relating how he came upon voodoo, and detailing his many experiences with it; Hyatt does the same, but also gives little insights into the evils of Xtianity. That's both a good and a bad thing - for one, assuming the author's truth, we're getting an inside look to a system prior to practising it, and not enough books on magick provide that for us; personal stories about the good and bad sides of the system are scarce. However, a warning must be stated that you're dredging through an autobiography that spans a third of the book - albeit, a relevant autobiography.
That said, my next gripe is the pretention of S. Black (and to a lesser extent, his co-author Christopher Hyatt). I'm not usually concerned with the authorship of books -- I read one of Silver Ravenwolf's books for ideas sometimes -- but the condescending attitude of Black is unmissable. He is ridiculously anti-Christian, and spares no time describing the horrors of Christianity as compared to the supposedly far-superior system of Voodoo -- be prepared to come across phrases like "...obviously due to Christian bigotry", "the Judeo-Christian religions and most of the New Age movement tell you to repress your emotions and desires and to (pretend to) think "happy thoughts"). My personal favourite is this one:
"[W]e both know first-hand the futility of attempting to appease a fascist religious philosophy whose stated purpose for the last millenium has been the elimination of all other religions in the world."
I find this a bit iffy given that my Catholic ex-boyfriend quite happily allowed me to summon demons in the middle of the bedroom.
There're also frequent jibes at "followers of Crowley" (the name Thelema is, if I recall, a
hapax legomenon within the book, which is strange, since Hyatt has co-written books with Lon Milo Duquette). I'm not disdainful of this downtalking because of my own identification with the New Age movement (indeed, in the book, Chaos Magick is mentioned favourably), but rather that Black seems a little unaware of who his target audience actually is -- phrases of the form "That's not to say there are no good X's - we have met them" appears a lot (as I recall, once after claiming that 95% of people involved in magickal groups are covering up their inferiority complexes).
Moving on, the practical side of voodoo is pretty underrepresented - there're only 60 pages of practical, useful theory, and even less practical work (really, only divination is covered; initiation is given a few pages.) There /are/ spells in the book, and they do seem pretty neat. A lot of the voodoo gods are given their own page with information, which I'm thankful for (interestingly, Hyatt and Black refer to voodoo loas in term of families - ie, the Eleggua family, the Eshu family - whereas Heike Owusu in "Voodoo rituals" refers to Eleggua and Eshu as distinct entities. Hm.)
Aside from Hyatt's and Blacks sneery attitudes, the autobiographical format of the book, and the lack of practicality, the book is pretty good as a source of information within urban Voodoo. I stress urban, since voodoo done by white men is not true voodoo - Black and Hyatt claim so themselves. I read it all in two sittings, and it /was/ pretty engrossing, so if you're interested in reading other people's magickal experiences (occult porn, really), or you have some sort of vague, undefined interest in voodoo, I'd suggest this book -- if you can put up with the authors' holier-than-thou attitudes. Otherwise, leave it alone.
Overall rating: 6/10PS: Excuse the whimsical, unstructured design of this review - I was eating fish'n chips at the time, and they were gooood. I'll do better next time. :/
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