Book Review - Psychic Witch, by Mat Auryn
Sometimes I more-or-less know what I’m getting into when I start reading a book, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to read it. Mat Auryn’s Psychic Witch was one of those. It’s a Llewellyn book, meaning I knew that it was likely to have the same witchcraft 101 structure that I was extremely familiar with since before the whole market pivoted from the word “pagan” to the word “witch”. It also uses the word “psychic” which led me to expect even more new-age framings than usual in this sort of book. With a setup like that, you might expect this review to be a rough one. It’s not. Everything I said above is true about this book, but I also found enough valuable in it to be very glad I read it.
Still, with all that setup, it’s reasonable to ask why I picked up this book in particular. The best explanation I have is that while the word “psychic” suggested a new-age outlook that made me wince, it also implied a focus on energy work, cosmology, and soul-anatomy, and all of those are very much my thing, even when I’m reading about a model I don’t buy into. The book also promised to talk about practices that are right in line with what I’m interested in learning. Magical techniques that don’t require a lot of physical trappings are always of interest to me, and my current focus specifically involves upping my “sensory” awareness of non-physical things. Even if I don’t like the word “psychic” much, I still have to admit that it’s the word most commonly used to describe that.
As I went through the chapters, I unsurprisingly found myself bouncing back and forth between “this is cool” and “this is frustrating”. The book actually spent a lot of time on theory, more than in most introductory books I’ve read, and the way it talked about theory was different from their typical “ask the universe” or “mess with probability” explanations. Specifically, Auryn’s method has a lot to do with patterning and sending energy, which is something that appeals to me and something I’m generally good at. In the case of this book, the patterning and sending was still more or less in service of “asking the universe”, but the specific operations involved were interesting to me. They were also very suggestive of ways to pattern and send the energy to other spirits as well, which is how I apply the energy paradigm to my animistic practice.
Unfortunately, what came along with that was heavy reliance on the pseudoscientific terminology characteristic of new-age and psychic writing. The term “vibration” is a pet peeve of mine, because it always seems to be used to put a sort of scientific veneer on top of the otherwise-useful statement that there are different types of magical energy that have different qualities. It always seems to be blended with a poor understanding of quantum physics and leveraged to conflate magical definitions of energy with physical ones, and this book is no exception. I don’t think that sort of discussion adds anything to the conversation. It often seems to be deployed (here and elsewhere) as a sort of play for credibility, that tying to scientific facts makes the magic more believable, and that makes it even more frustrating. I believe that for anyone with sufficient knowledge of science, it has the opposite effect, and for anyone without, it risks making science seem less credible, rather than magic more credible.
When the book went beyond theory and into magical practice, it’s likewise a mixed bag, with some ideas that I found inspirational, and others I found remarkably trite. One thing I really liked was the recommendation to rely heavily on active imagination, not simply in the Jungian sense, but in a way that is meant to straightforwardly inject play and fun into magical working. Early on the book suggests taking some time to imagine you’re the most powerful psychic and magic-user you could be, as a way to build a feeling of possibility and capability. While I’m a bit wary that this could be dangerous for some folks, I also believe that it can be a really helpful inspirational practice when used mindfully. Magic is all about expansion of possibility, and being willing to go big is a great way to start that.
Another technique it used that resonated well was a three-part soul model, starting from the Feri tradition and making explicit reference to the Cauldrons of Poesy as well. Both of these are structures that resonate well with me, and have informed my own understanding of energetic anatomy, and here they were connected to even simple spells in a way that I found instructive for my own work. Unfortunately, this was also where the book leaned the most into something that I struggled with, framing the “higher soul” in terms of concepts like “True Will” and “Higher Purpose”. I find that all-too-often, this sort of framing can lead someone into tying themselves in knots about ego and desire, and my own practice benefits from being relational instead. Nothing is about me, not even a “higher” me, it’s about how I can play a part in a vast web of spirit-relationships.
The book closes out, as so many do, with a listing of various practical spells. They covered a lot of the typical ground: money, protection, attraction, and all of them with little more trappings than a few words and a lot of visualization. Most of these were ideas I was very well familiar with, but for the most part the visualizations that Auryn provides really helped them resonate for me. I find it helpful to see what someone else’s practice looks like, if only as a way to help me imagine what mine can do as well. That being said, there was a lot of repetition in here (candle-dressing is surely basically the same thing as offering-sweetening, isn’t it?) and some things that just felt shallow; I need more than a simple cartoonish visualization and a rhyming couplet for magic to feel real to me.
Ultimately, reading this book was valuable to me largely because of the places where I wanted to push back against it. It forced me to think, to respond to it and in so doing, better define what I want out of magical system and structure. What worked in the book worked well, like focusing on multisensory experience, even if it has to be “imaginary”, and tying that in with a well-developed system, which itself can serve to spark the imagination and the spirit. And the things that didn’t work also helped me define what I value as well, like the ability to think critically and not appeal to unearned authority, and the importance of de-centering the self and instead living in a web of connection. I asked myself at one point how this book would’ve worked for me when I was newer in my practice, how it would’ve compared to what I actually read back then. The answer for me was pretty favorable. It provided rich systems to build within and build from, while at the same time didn’t make me feel like I was doing magic wrong because I wasn’t holding perfectly to someone else’s list of ingredients and correspondences. There was a lot I had to mentally throw out, but what I wanted to keep was structure, rather than fragments. I just hope that anyone else choosing to read this, no matter where they are in their magical explorations, is as willing and comfortable with reading critically and only keeping what they find truly valuable.