Book Review - Elements of Magic
Elements of Magic is a book that I read on a whim, since I saw it on Kindle Unlimited (as many if not most Llewellyn books seem to be these days) when I was looking for a new pagan book to read. I’ve seen a lot of value in elemental work, and I’ve been curious about the Reclaiming tradition for a while, so it seemed like a good one to delve into. I’m glad I did; even though the book was certainly entry-level and not a perfect fit for my own practice, I still found helpful tidbits that made it worth the read.
According to the introduction, the book is set up to reflect and recreate the Elements of Magic class that Reclaiming groups offer in person and online, which teach the basics of ritual and spellcraft in their tradition within a framework of the five elements (using Spirit as the fifth in addition to Earth, Air, Fire, and Water). I have a few friends who I greatly respect with history in Reclaiming, and I’ve been particularly inspired by what I know of their approach to experiential mythic ritual, so I was hoping to find more of that in this book. Ritualcraft is something that’s really important to me, and I’m always looking for ways to do it better.
Unsurprisingly, since it’s patterned off of what’s essentially a “fundamentals” class (and is a book from Llewellyn), most of the material inside was pretty introductory, covering the usual ground of basic grounding, centering, divination, simple ritual and spell concepts, and so on. However, the format is different from most, in that it interleaved different essays, broadly themed around the elements, with detailed writeups of rituals and exercises, and all of these were attributed to over a dozen authors. Through the reading, I started to get a good sense of the different styles and concerns of the different contributors, which did a lot better job expressing the diversity and breath that pagan spirituality can take on, compared to one book that’s just from one person’s perspective.
Since the book also serves as an introduction to Reclaiming in particular, I also learned a lot about that tradition. I hadn’t realized how foundational it is to a lot of what we think of as modern neo-paganism (the fact that Starhawk is a member of that tradition indicated as such right away). In a way, that stitched together why even in practices that have diverged a lot from Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft, there’s still a lot of commonality in the basic practices and terminology. In a sense this felt like reading The Lord of the Rings after reading a lot of other fantasy, and saying “Oh, that’s where those tropes come from!”
The flip side of that was also seeing how Reclaiming itself is derived from the Feri tradition. That’s another one I have some experience with (at least in the sense of reading some books and personally knowing a few folks who’ve been influenced by it), and it’s one that has both intrigued me and left me conflicted. Intrigued because I respond well to built-out lore and distinct practices, and Feri has its share of that, and conflicted because Feri feels built on some rather questionably appropriative stuff (like huna), and because some of the specifics of the theology don’t entirely mesh with my own. Still, it felt like Reclaiming makes some strides to address those rough patches, making it feel like something I could more easily identify with.
With the wide variety of different rituals and exercises in the book, it’s no surprise that some of them appealed to me more than others. There were actually some, especially some of the specific guided meditations in the Earth section, that struck a chord in me and gave me a valuable perspective on an element that I usually mostly ignore. There were others that were clearly very fundamental, like some of the descriptions of creating space and consecrating tools, that were clearly very fundamental but still described in a way that made me realize I skipped some fundamentals because of my odd path into paganism, and seeing them described from scratch was instructive. And there were some that didn’t feel like my thing at all; an area like this was some of the focus (inherited from Feri) on the “God is Self and Self is God” implementation of the divine within. This doesn’t resonate with my particular approach to relational polytheism, where the distinctness of myself and gods (and many other sorts of beings) is valuable, where the existence of me as me and Gods as Gods doesn’t necessarily require bowing or subservience, etc. Still, just seeing those concepts presented inspired me to think deeply about my reaction and gave me a better understanding of where I’m at personally.
There perhaps wasn’t as much direct discussion of a “Reclaiming-style ritual” in this book as I’d hoped, though there was a chapter that gave a good overview of it at the end. This is one of the places where took the most from the book, since it finally gave me a different perspective on something I’ve seen from certain spheres of paganism that I’ve never entirely understood, that every ritual should be centered around “raising energy” for “spellwork.” To me, I think sometimes the point of a ritual is simply to connect with self, or others, or Gods… but this book made the (obvious in retrospect) point that those count as “spellwork”, at least in that lexicon. And indeed, thinking of being specific about things like ‘intention’ and ‘rising action’ in ritual has helped give me a structure to something that otherwise has felt a bit loose in some of my ritual work.
This book was a fairly straightforward read, but one I’m still glad I did. I learned more than I expected, even if it was different things than I expected. The examples in here rounded out my practice in useful ways, I actually have adopted a new framework for my daily practice based on an outline in the Spirit chapter that’s working really well for me. In general, Elements of Magic shows how valuable it can be to go back to basics sometimes… even if now I’m looking for deeper and more complicated things to read next.