Books, books, and more books
Last night we finished the horribly disappointing Nocturnal Witchcraft book. Yayyy!!! In two weeks, we begin our next Craft book, The Way of the Hedge Witch, by Arin Murphy-Hiscock. I bought it a few months ago, and while I haven't started reading it, I HAVE looked through it, and I don't think this one will disappoint us.
Meanwhile, we are also reading Diane Paxson's Essential Asatru, as we believe that learning about and understanding other paths is very important. Definitely an excellent read. I do wish it was a bit more in-depth rather than a fairly general overview, but that's okay, it's certainly MUCH better than the other (very limited) options out there. When I was working on my modern Asatru project for my anthro grad class, the only text I could find was The Rites of Odin by Edward Fitch, which is advertised as "the complete source volume on Odinism". NOT!! It covers the various deities in the Norse pantheon fairly well, but is extremely Wiccanized when it comes to rituals and practices. (In my opinion, it should actually have been titled Wiccan Asatru.) Paxson's book describes a VERY different path, and since her group is the one I actually visited when working on that project, I can verify that the event I attended was much more like what she describes in her book than anything in Fitch's book.
A friend recently sent me a copy of a book called Shaman of Tibet, which is about Jetsun Milarepa, one of Tibet's most famous yogis/poets and a major figure in Tibetan Buddhism. At first I thought it was fiction, as the writing style is somewhat indicative of that, but it may not be; what I've read about him online differs somewhat from the book, and he lived from 1052-1153 CE, it's hard to tell! Anyway, it's proving very interesting so far.
Finally, I'm really getting into Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts. It was rather difficult to read at first, because the book was originally a doctoral thesis, and the writers (understandably) tend to create long, complicated sentences to sound intelligent and scholarly to their committee. Fortunately, he loosens up as he gets into his subject, and it becomes MUCH easier to read.
Okay, back to the grindstone. Thank goodness, now we're getting WORK at work...