jankp's Full Review: Phyllis Curott - Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman's...
Does your blood turn to ice when you hear the term, “witchcraft”? Do you cringe and look for the nearest exit when somebody tells you that they’re a witch? Maybe you think of the bloody history of witches, of the Salem Witch Trials and the Inquisition by the fear-driven Catholic Church back in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? If so, you’re not alone, but if you would read up about what they really believe and why their belief in magic and the need for goddess worship is coming back strong today, then like me you would lose that fear.
That’s why I have read books on the subject, the latest being Phyllis Curott’s Book of Shadows. She begins her story in the seventies’ when, lost in the New York City rat race, she works as a struggling legal director for a little union reform group that fights against the mob, studying for the bar. She starts noticing some weird things happening to her rational world that cannot be explained.
The word “Isis” haunts her almost constantly, driving her to try to figure out why the name was distracting her so. Why also had she decorated her bedroom in the colors of the Nile, the Egyptian river, and put up posters of Egyptian priestesses and queens? Was it the bedsheets she slept on that had Egyptian hieroglyphic designs on them? She lingers in the Egyptian exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum during lunch hours and has a quote from The Egyptian Book of the Dead appear in her biography of James Dean. Finally her best friend reveals that she is a witch and asks if she’d like to meet other witches. She refuses the offer, but later her friend asks if she’d like her palms read.
Curot has learned from The Egyptian Book of the Dead that Isis was a goddess and Witch (capitalized) and so she nervously agrees. This was completely foreign territory for her since she had grown up with very intellectual parents who shunned all religion as superstitious and her life circled around what she could see and know. She has never known the magic of being in love or believed in a higher power that would help her live her life. The mysterious experience of having her palms read is an eye-opening one as it accurately describes what has been happening to her lately.
The Shadow Knows…
Curot is then invited to the palm reader’s meeting in a few days where she will explain what witchcraft is all about. Her friend will go along with her. When they come back to the shadowy bookstore, they step through a hidden door into a cramped room with lots of women chatting away, Celtic music in the background, no pointy hats or black dresses. She is told she was expected by the older priestess, who, though a stranger to her, warmly embraces her. Immediately Curott feels at home. She has never had sisters before. The meetings she keeps attending without her solitary witch-friend, when she can get off work, intrigue and comfort her at the same time. That is until the priestesses lead them in a “banishing” spell! She sees a menacing shadow by the door of the room and is terrified to go near what looks like a towering cloud in a storm.
Frantically the women keep running in a circle with hands held, chanting “Be gone!” until finally a ceramic bowl on the altar in the middle of the circle explodes and that makes the shadow vanish. Curott’s faith in the priestesses suddenly wavers, for she now realizes they are human, also. At home she lays down, thinking about what had happened and it comes again. This time it looks like “a black ghost robed in open wounds.” Shivering, she does not look away and cannot move. It hovers by the door just like earlier.
Curott suddenly remembers what she’s been taught, that the magic comes from within, sort of like what Glinda the Good Witch told Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and she demands to know who it is. Slowly the words come to her mind, “I am the Guardian at the Gate, I am the Shadow. Push against me.”
Horrified at the thought of touching it, she hesitates, but then it moves towards her and she grabs a flickering candle beside her, shoves it into the shadow, and destroys it. Listen to the wisdom she gains from the experience:
Any truly spiritual journey will, inevitably, lead you to the Guardian at the Gate. Until we confront it, and master the challenges this shadow presents, it will hold us back from the fullest experience of our true, divine selves. Once we understand the shadow is our teacher, in whatever shape it assumes—fear, doubt, hunger for power, shame, selfishness or any self-destructive or harmful trait—we can wrest from it the keys to the realm of the Goddess.
What I Learned
In thirteen chapters with such titles as “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Between the Worlds,” “Magic Mirrors and Altered States,” and “As Above, So Below,” Curott takes us with her on her fascinating journey to becoming Aradia, a priestess of the Goddess. I was a bit disappointed that the name she chooses, Aradia, is only revealed at the last moment to her instead of being revealed to her all along, but it is an appropriate name, nonetheless, since Aradia was a goddess who defeated death.
I learned a lot of history of Goddess worship, which began in 7000 B.C.E., the Upper Neolithic Age, when writing, commerce and art began to flourish, and continued until a patriarchal god took over and Goddess worship had to go underground. Despite the Catholic Church’s attempt to eradicate it, it survived and is enjoying a surge of popularity today. Witches do not worship Satan and do not inflict their will on others in spells. Curott even includes the process of casting several kinds of spells and how to visualize yourself as a big, healthy tree, for example, to change your consciousness. That is what magic is all about. By changing your level of awareness, you can find who you are, confront your shadow, and become a better, more alive person.
As I read the book, I wondered whether Curott would find love since she used a love spell, but she continued to just enjoy sex with a man we never met. The spell did encourage her to love herself and Earth a lot more. I don't think I can say that practicing Witchcraft makes you hate men, hehe, but indeed the priestesses and some in the circle are lesbian couples, two of which had been raped, and Curott’s new best friend is divorced and being stalked. The author, also, was being sexually harassed at work and she finally decides to visualize hexes on her boss’s door, which stops the harassing for a couple weeks. He then blows his lid after receiving all her anger and fires her.
That taught her to be careful of what and how she wished for things!
So do I believe in this magic stuff? Well, do I believe in myself?
According to Witchcraft, magic can only work if you believe the power to change comes from within. I’ve talked to a few witches before this book and they say they practice on their own instead of in a coven, or circle. They don’t usually cast spells, but chanting helps to center them and give them energy. Nothing wrong with that, but I find my energy in writing or communicating with people and not praying to the spirits of Egyptian goddesses.
If this interests you, I will recommend Curott’s book, but also the first novel that introduced me to the subject, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, which is a search for the Holy Grail or, as Curott explains, a search originally for the divinity within or the Goddess wisdom.
Now in paperback--the true story of an Ivy League lawyer s discovery of the ancient practice of Goddess and Wiccan spirituality, witchcraft, and white...More at Buy.com
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