I haven’t touched a book on magick for a while for a while. I think the last actual books on magick I’ve handled was a variety of books on metaphysics (including magick & alchemy) at the Library of Congress. The most I remember from the LoC was handling Rosicrucian journals. They were nifty reading. Surprisingly, I didn’t find a lot of super good stuff in that section of the Library of Congress, but the better stuff is scattered around the LoC. I should write a “How to find stuff/research at the Library of Congress” post one day.

The reason? I just don’t think there’s a lot of really good books out there that are entering my stratosphere. Like, I feel like I have advanced well past the beginner books and all the others books that I would want right now I already have. And what books are out there are really Western perspective, I kinda am done with having books from White authors, I think I have enough of those and there is more than enough out there. I just want more diversely written books.

To be honest, I lean towards academic books now because they have way more information than the newbie and Pagan books. That and I can find way more information that is really useful for knowing and to help me with my practices. Things like history, symbolization and culture. Otherwise, I will feel lost and hesitant, going “Whyyyyyyy does pomegranates mean ‘good dreams’ in this spell and what the heck is blue salt and why do I need it? Has this always been a thing?” Even if I still know a fraction of the info, I’ll still be unsure because welcome to academia and intellectualism: just because you think you know something doesn’t mean you can’t still be astoundingly wrong because you were too dumb to check.

I usually find good materials in libraries (it’s my career, of course I’m going to use the resources that I’m paid to provide for others) but mainly, I’ve been finding things via Tumblr through the meantime. I follow a number of Pagan and Witchcraft blogs and anything I find of note or of usefulness, I slap into my “magick” tag. Some of the blogs I follow are:

None of the witchy blogs that I follow or find major stuff from are White ran, I think. I think the only ones that potentially could be White-ran is just the catch-all blog, Low Budget Witches, which is really informative.

It’s just that Paganism is very diverse. Western Paganism pulls from a bevy of cultures, I rather follow people from those cultures or at least just looking at those cultures through a non-White lens. For me, I get more history, information and usefulness this way. It isn’t White-washed, dumbed down information usually and there’s a lot more background to the info because there’s just some things that reading dry academic books can’t tell you but someone related to the culture can.

The info I find is really cool but I’ve read enough to know to take things with a grain of salt and to fact-check everything. I like the info I find but I also know that I’m going to run it through several books to make sure I understand everything I’m reading. Witchcraft isn’t all random nonsense with candles, bells and whistles. Neither is Paganism, there’s a rhyme and reason to everything. It may look nonsensical to folks who never researched Paganism and learned about Witchcraft from television and movies but there’s a lot of background on it. I just need to know what it is before I proceed with anything new.

Honestly, I thought I wasn’t looking at anything new in Paganism and thought I was a kinda sucky Pagan because of it until it dawned on me that I was, I just wasn’t doing my usual: reading a cavalcade of books to get the information. Instead, I was taking the digital route, which is uncommon for me because books are a little more fact-checked than what someone can slap on a website. Yes, I am painfully aware that books can have really crappy information, I’m just use to the mental connection of “book=factual information, internet=potential brain fart” and it takes a while to change that thinking.

Huzzah, progress.