{"id":1117,"date":"2009-02-03T04:14:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T04:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1117"},"modified":"2009-02-03T04:14:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T04:14:00","slug":"review-good-witches-fly-smoothly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1117","title":{"rendered":"Review: Good Witches Fly Smoothly"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of books about religious Wicca out there. There are a lot of books about practical magic, spells, etc. There are very few books about what happens next, but Good Witches Fly Smoothly: Surviving Witchcraft<\/a><\/em> is one of them.<\/p>\n

Mistake 27: Using a mind key that can be misinterpreted.<\/em> (Otherwise known as the Law of Unintended Consequences or “be careful what you ask for.” Here’s my version<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Whether it is called witchcraft or sorcery, the material taught by Gavin and Yvonne Frost through their School of Wicca has always been highly practical. Gavin did start out as an engineer, after all.<\/p>\n

Mistake 35: Helping nonentities with no credentials to inflate their egos.<\/span><\/p>\n

Good Witches Fly Smoothly<\/span> distills several decades’ worth of magical tales from their own experience and those of their students.<\/p>\n

“In each case,” they write, “the outcome was unexpected. In each case, authors’ analysis reveals what went wrong and why.”<\/p>\n

Mistake 78: The mistake Flo made was believing everything Chester, as a [spirit] guide, told her without keeping her mind in gear.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you have ever suffered through some vague airy ritual for “healing the planet” or “world peace,” you will appreciate this book. It is practical to its fingertips.<\/p>\n

Mistake 88: The intent of the ritual became polluted because they felt they had to have the orgasm to achieve the goal. No orgasm, no car was the assumption.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have sprinkled four of the authors’ summaries through this brief review. There are 99 of them in the book. Get it and read them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of books about religious Wicca out there. There are a lot of books about practical magic, spells, etc. There are very few books about what happens next, but Good Witches Fly Smoothly: Surviving Witchcraft is one of them. Mistake 27: Using a mind key that can be misinterpreted. (Otherwise known as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[7,29],"class_list":["post-1117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-publishing","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-i1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=586","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":0},"title":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 31, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters draws attention to a 2001 interview with Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone recently re-published in the online zine The Wiccan-Pagan Times.Janet Farrar, who came to the Craft in the late 1960s, seems to dancing around a more skeptical position as regarding Gerald Gardner's finding a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10422,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10422","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":1},"title":"A Festschrift for Ronald Hutton","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Magic and Witchery: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' will be published in September by Palgrave Macmillan. I love rolling the word Festschrift around, and if you are not used to it, this is what it means: \"In academia, a Festschrift\u00a0 (plural Festschriften) is a book\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/magic-and-witchery-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":457,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=457","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":2},"title":"She Went among the Witches","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 23, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Waterbrook, Random House's evangelical-publishing operation, has announced Wicca's Charm: Understanding the Spiritual Hunger Behind the Rise of Modern Witchcraft and Pagan Spirituality, a new journalistic survey of Wicca in America.From the Web site:Hundreds of thousands of people practice Wicca and other forms of modern Pagan spirituality in America today, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Wicca\"","block_context":{"text":"Wicca","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=wicca"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0877881987","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6142,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6142","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":3},"title":"1971: Witches in Bellbottoms, Talking Heads","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is a 1971 documentary from the BBC that is supposed to be about witches. But at the time it was made, no one was making much effort to sort out the new Pagan Witches, anthropological and folkloric witches, and Satanic witches of the Church of Satan variety. So what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1200,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1200","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":4},"title":"Sex and Witchcraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 3, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The popular image of the sexually alluring witch goes back to Circe at least, was notable in the early modern period in the work of artists such as Hans Baldung, and got a big boost from Jules Michelet.It keeps popping up today. Sometimes it is lightly disguised, as in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"sexuality\"","block_context":{"text":"sexuality","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=sexuality"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11058,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11058","url_meta":{"origin":1117,"position":5},"title":"Witchcraft Cycles and the Official Witch of LA","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 6, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Jason Mankey's Raise the Horns blog (in the sidebar) carries his look back over the previous decade, \"Paganism & Witchcraft in the 2010's.\" I urge you to read it. I would like to add just a little bit of nuance to one passage: Until recently Modern Witchcraft was generally tied\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Mayor-Sam-Yorty-Louise-Huebner-the-Official-Witch-of-Los-Angeles-Portrait.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}