BROTH FROM THE CAULDRON

A Wiccan practitioner shares 40 years of magic in this memoir.

In a series of vignettes about her experiences and development as a self-described shamanic witch, Fallingstar (White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God, 2011, etc.) draws on themes of spirituality, history, psychology, and also addresses social and political issues. Early chapters tell the story of the author as a young girl, when she says she started to get hints that there was magic in the world and that it was an integral part of her own soul. Readers meet her family, friends, and kindred spirits she met over the years—an eclectic band of companions—as she recounts their shared experiences. Some chapters take a rollicking trip through the 1970s hippie subculture, in which she was an enthusiastic participant; in them, she writes of acid trips (in one, a giant baby gorilla battles with a god that’s “entirely composed of seething, flickering blue fire”) and free love (her ethical code was to “never to sleep with a married man unless I was also sleeping with his wife”). The chapters fly by, as most are only three or four pages long, and Fallingstar’s wry, witty observations are amusing; for example, she likens one Wiccan principle to the no-refund policy at her favorite Chinese restaurant (“When we don’t like what we have ordered from life’s menu, we can’t just send it back”). Readers will find it fun to skip around, which is easy to do, as the author’s story isn’t strictly chronological; the first half is broadly about her childhood and the latter, her development into a Wiccan practitioner. Skeptics will find some portions difficult to accept, such as her accounts of past-life memories of being burned as a witch. However, the book effectively dispels notions that witches are generally motivated by evil, and the author expresses her love of nature, noting that she “always prefer[s] to look for logic, to assume the supernatural is actually just super natural—something in nature we just don’t understand yet.” Her closing words aptly quote the 1970 film Little Big Man: “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Pagans, spiritualists, and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.