Witches of America

By Alex Mar

Book Overview

Witches of America is a memoir of Alex Mar's immersive five-year trip into the occult, as both a journalist and someone searching for her own faith. She explores modern Paganism--from its roots in 1950s England to its present-day American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies--and decides to train in a coven herself. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374536430
• ISBN13: 9780374536435
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

There Are Better Introductory Texts

If you're interested in Paganism and modern day witchcraft, this text serves as an okay introduction, but there are more informative texts to spend your time on. What I hoped the book would be: Philosophy of witchcraft and an explanation of the different groups practicing in America today and how they differ from one another. What the book actually is: The author is using these groups to explore her own identity and is seeking some kind of ineffable fulfilment of self by participating in their rites of passage. Unfortunately, she does this with kind of a predatory/exploitative mindset--it's all about what she can get out of the experience, with a healthy side of her casting judgment on the practices she witnesses from a position of skepticism. Personally, I wanted the movement explained to me by someone who practices and believes in it, not from an outsider looking in and making educated guesses. In short, it's not totally uninformative, but I needed to purchase subsequent books to feel like I understood the topic.