Five Non-Witchy Books Every Witch Should Read
First published on my now defunct private Patreon community on February 16, 2019. I now continue regular musings in my private email newsletter. Interested in signing up? Click here.
People ask me about what books they should read. No, wait, let me rephrase that – new and experienced witches alike often ask me what books they should read in order to improve their magic and their witchcraft. Though I completely understand where this question comes from and the desires and drives that motivate it, I must confess to being perpetually bored and/or frustrated in response. I know, I know, mean! Ok, so hear me out. I’mma give you a book list anyway, and it’s not gonna be what you think.
What I could do is give you a list of my top practitioner written books, practical works about how to do this and how to do that. I could also give you a list of in-depth academic histories and anthropological studies. I actually likely will end up doing both on this Patreon at some point, as it has been so frequently sought after! (And I do have an extensive bibliography at the end of Witchbody, for anyone who is as much of a keener as I am and doesn’t feel like waiting to hear the ‘why’ of my bibliographical choices!)
This list, however, has absolutely none of that stuff on it.
On this list, I’ve included books that have strengthened my witchcraft immensely, even if at first glance one might assume that they have absolutely nothing to do with witchcraft. And, it’s true: they don’t. At least not explicitly. The word ‘witch’ doesn’t really appear in any of these books, with the exception of perhaps one. These books are not about witches, they aren’t about magic. Or are they?
The point of me making this counterintuitive list is manifold.
First, I’d like to underscore that it’s important to look for magic everywhere.
We don’t just learn about magic from books about magic.
If we do make that choice, I’d argue that we’re limiting ourselves and our practice. The most important influences on my perspectives on witchcraft and magic came from people outside of the practice – academics, historians, philosophers, artists, poets – most of whom had nothing whatsoever to say specifically about witchcraft. The biggest ‘book’ I can recommend about witchcraft itself is life experience; is the book of speaking to the spirits themselves, is the book of putting your ear on the grassy earth and having a good listen.
Witchcraft is the most important part of my life. It’s in everything I do. I see everything, consume everything, read everything, hear everything, feel everything through the lens of magic and witchcraft and spirit work. It’s the filter through which all else flows, and always has been. Everything I read helps and feeds into and influences my magic. How can it not?
It’s with all of this in mind that I give you this somewhat counterintuitive list of books that have nothing to do with witchcraft that I believe every witch should read.
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I’m gonna start off with what likely will be the most obvious book on this list. It’s so hard to choose five anyway – like, what the hell – but you have to start somewhere, right? I fucking love this book. This is my favourite book ever written, and I strongly believe that everyone should read it. It’s my manual for life. I re-read it every year, usually in the winter time (I’m rereading it right now!), in order to come back to myself and remember who I am, who I want to be, and how to get there. Every time I read it I get something different from it, my knowledge deepens, a new aspect of its wisdom unfurls and reveals itself to me.
Slight disclaimer, though: this book was published in 1992, and its language is relatively cis-centric and hetero-centric. Do keep that in mind if that’s something you might find alienating. That being said, I still do feel that this is still an appropriate read for non-binary, genderqueer, and male identifying people, if you can create space for the cis-based language to transform a bit in your mind as you read it. There is still so much wisdom in this book about how to stay true to yourself, how to best love ourselves and others, how to make art, how to recover from pain, how to live an honest life full of passion. How to be in connection. How to have discernment about which others to let close, how to make sure your alarm bells are always fully functional, and how to repair them if they’ve gotten a little rusty. I unfurl into this book with every break up. I read it every time I’m feeling sad and lost. It always does the trick, it always rescues me, reminds me how to tend to my own fire when it gets dim, reminds me there is still fire there after all. If I have a bible, this is it. Let this book teach you to come home to yourself when you don’t realize that you’ve even strayed at all.
Since our tarot card of the month for February is very much about coming into alignment with who we truly are, it’s worth mentioning that no book has helped me connect to the energy of ‘alignment’ more than this one. If you’re looking for a book to go along with the lesson of that card, this is it.
When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, by Gabor Mate
This book is a really friendly book that is basically about how the stress related to trauma has an impact on the development of many unpleasant physical health conditions later in life. The main text rarely names ‘trauma’ head-on until the very end, but it’s alluded to throughout the text. This is sneaky, but important, as many people may be experiencing some denial about their past; maybe think that things weren’t quite as bad as they actually were. This is often a maladaptation, a survival mechanism. As I’ve said elsewhere, I can provide an incredibly long reading list on trauma, but those books often can only successfully be read, digested, and taken in deeply once a person has come to terms with and named most aspects of their life, past and present, haunting and celebratory.
This book is good for everyone, no matter where you’re at, from being just a little bit stressed out with work or family, to completely not wanting to talk about your past lest the dreaded ‘a-word’ be uttered (ssh, it’s ‘abuse’). Wherever you’re at on your journey of truth-telling and reflection, this book has got you covered in its own simple and quiet yet dramatic and profound way. It is incredibly accessible, approachable, and not too scary. It feels like a soft but still incredibly potent and powerful introduction to this content.
Working through post-traumatic stress is a big component of my witchcraft, and so this book has influenced my craft deeply. Another thing I particularly enjoy about this book is the author’s eloquent passages of how something like mindset, perspective, and intention can truly help in recovery. It may be tempting to write this off as new age ‘The Secret’ kind of bullshit, but it’s not – he backs his ideas up clinically and scientifically, and I think we can really see some of the power and magic of intention in the way that he does this.
I also see this as relevant if any of you are doing ancestral based witchcraft, magic, and spirit work. When we work with ancestors and spirits, we are also coming into contact with their histories, our histories, their traumas, our traumas, and how their pains and traumas and stress compound into the person we are and have become and will be. In my opinion it’s impossible to do thoughtful ancestor based spirit work and witchcraft without incorporating any understanding of familial stress, family systems, and traumatic illness. I also believe that witchcraft and magic for healing and transformation are best used collaboratively with clinical industrial medicine, and so this book has been crucial for me in building my understanding of the relationship between stress and illness, and has been a welcome addition to my library of books about working with ancestral cycles and lineages.
Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, by Sarah Schulman
Witches need to know about conflict. That’s right, you heard me! Drama among witches, covens, and magical factions is unfortunately incredibly common, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard about witch wars or someone cursing someone else for looking at them wrong, I’d have more money than I knew what to do with.
Many of us likely have a very strong handle on what constitutes abuse, but what about everyday boring conflict that, while deeply mundane, may still be triggering? Reading this book was absolutely life changing for me. It inspired me to get out of an abusive relationship. It helped me dramatically reframe what was going on in a friend group I was in at the time, and helped me gain the strength to leave those friends behind, due to the incredibly unhealthy and normalized ways that they dealt with normative conflict – and weren’t interested in hearing of other ways to be and relate.
There are tons of books on recovering from abuse – and I’m happy to provide a massive reading list on abuse and trauma alone, if that’s of interest to anyone – but this book is about mistakes communities often make when grappling with conflict. Disagreement. Upset. Hurt feelings. Overstating harm, exaggeration, supremacy behaviour, entitlement, feeling and acting as though quickly claiming ‘abuse’ is the only way to receive care.
Why is this relevant for witches? Well, first of all, witches are people, and second of all, though I’m no love-and-light type, it’s crucial that we don’t go around flinging curses, hexes, and bindings at everyone that slightly pisses us off. It’s just not appropriate, and it can be reactive, coming from an activated place of trauma and flashback rather than what’s actually going on in the present moment, on the ground.
Witchcraft is often attractive to folks on the margins. Queers, trans folks, family black sheep, disabled folks, misfits, people in counterculture. Often, we have a lot of trauma due to abuse and mistreatment. We lash out and hurt each other when it isn’t warranted. We overreact and are needlessly divisive. (Trust me, I’m all for division and attack when it’s justified.) Hurt people hurt people. Sometimes we protect ourselves and lash out at authority. That’s cool. But what about when we jump first to hurting each other over small mistakes and pains that can easily be talked out or mediated with a little love and care?
Having the descriptive and framing tools to see situations and relational dynamics a little bit differently is helpful. In order to build more caring communities, it’s important to make room for more than just call-out culture, in which literally every hurt feeling constitutes abuse and is an excuse to excommunicate, curse, banish, demonize, and vilify.
Some may find this a controversial or difficult read, but to me Schulman’s insights here are indespensible. I never leave home without them.
In the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, by Bruno Latour
Okay, so now we get into the more academic shit. This book and the next one are the two more ‘theory nerd’ titles on this list, but I think y’all can handle it!
Probably no thinker has influenced me more than Bruno Latour. He’s a crucial figure in the academic study of the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science, otherwise known as Science and Technology Studies. I won’t go on too much about all of his other books – which I love deeply and find endlessly important, particularly Reassembling the Social – but this little tome is a nice and short introduction to some of the work he does and the way he thinks.
As folks who are interested in and practice witchcraft and magic – often pitted against science as its opposite – I think it’s crucial that we know how to deconstruct some of the unspoken assumptions that most folks have about what science is and how scientific knowledge is created and produced. A lot of people seem to presume that facts exist ‘out there’ like apples on a tree to be plucked; Latour masterfully turns this on its head and explains the relationship between the fact and the fetish. This is a continuation of some of the ideas in his seminal work We Have Never Been Modern, in which he argues that what we think of as ‘modernity’ – part of which involves a separation of spirituality/superstition and science – has not actually yet been achieved.
I’ll pull a little description from the Duke University Press website, as I can’t phrase this better myself: “In this concise work, Latour delves into the ‘belief in naive belief,’ the suggestion that fetishes—objects invested with mythical powers—are fabricated and that facts are not. Mobilizing his work in the anthropology of science, he uses the notion of ‘factishes’ to explore a way of respecting the objectivity of facts and the power of fetishes without forgetting that both are fabricated. While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons. Yet Moderns sense no contradiction at the core of their work. Latour pursues his critique of critique, or the possibility of mediating between subject and object, or the fabricated and the real, through the notion of ‘iconoclash,’ making productive comparisons between scientific practice and the worship of visual images and religious icons.”
Groundbreaking stuff, right?
I hope that the relevance of this line of inquiry to magical practitioners is immediately obvious, but just in case it’s not I’ll tell you a little bit about why I think it is! Often magic and people who believe in it and practice it are thought of as silly, naïve, foolish, stupid – any fun bundle of derogatory and insulting words, and that we must not be thoughtful or intellectual. I see a lot of magical folks stumbling when asked how they feel about science, and the relationship between science and magic. I want us magical people to gain more skills to articulate how and why we feel what we do, and sometimes academic and philosophical language can be incredibly helpful in this regard. It can feel empowering and liberating! When I found this kind of academic work I felt so free, like I had finally found someone who had so perfectly articulated what I felt intuitively all of my life. This book may be a little outside your typical purview, but I truly do urge you to give it a shot when you’re ready. The translation is fun and lyrical; reading Latour always makes me smile and laugh.
The Promise of Happiness, by Sara Ahmed
Everything Sara Ahmed writes is pretty much brilliant, but I wanna zero in on this one today. This book critiques the mystique of ‘happiness’ in contemporary Western culture. Witchy scenes often share a lot of space with the positive thinking, new age crowds, particularly in North America – and so there can be endless social and cultural pressure to focus on good thoughts, happy feelings, and ‘white’ ‘healing’ magic. This can be particularly true if we find ourselves in the public eye, or in positions of leadership. I see this book as an excellent antidote to spiritual bypassing (and there’s another book on that topic alone that I’ll recommend another time), which is so rampant in so many witchy and spiritual communities.
Spiritual bypassing – briefly summarized – is the tendency to ‘spiritualify’ yourself out of any challenging or difficult emotion, which are often coded as ‘negative.’ Instead of working through emotions, they are jumped over, like a hurdle in an obstacle course. This involves not looking at the past too closely, not examining our bad behaviours and the impact it may have on others. This means not examining our own hurt and anger, the ways we’ve caused pain and absorbed pain. It means crying at the beauty of the sound of ‘om’ on a yoga retreat instead of reflecting on and coming to terms with the fact that you just physically and verbally assaulted your girlfriend last week. What leads people to be like that? Why pursue ‘happiness’ in this avoidant way?
Often you see very self-proclaimed ‘spiritual’ folks who tout positive thinking and constant positivity and also a non-reactive ‘mindfulness’ lash out in anger, rage, and – at worst – abusive behaviours, despite all of their ‘trainings.’ I honestly fucking hate this and see it as the absolute worst. I am all for going deep, going into the shadows, and moving headfirst into examining our feelings, experiences, and past traumas in order to truly integrate and overcome them. What is witchcraft – or indeed any kind of spirituality – without it?
The Promise of Happiness gives an excellent critique of happiness culture, affirms the power and importance and wisdom of buzzkills (the term ‘feminist killjoy’ was coined in Ahmed’s work, as far as I’m aware, and she goes deep into it in this book), and suggests ways to move forward that might be more healthy, authentic, thoughtful, and well-considered. Since so much magic involves moving towards things we think may make us happy, I think a critique of happiness itself (as a concept, as something to ‘move towards’ or ‘to be achieved’) needs to be a part of the reading list of any serious witch and magical practitioner who isn’t just interested in a quick fix. As witches, we need to carefully consider the philosophies and worldviews we buy into – these ways of perceiving the world will always influence the types of magic we do and how we do them.