Thank you to all my readers and supporters, it’s been a good run! Life is getting busier and busier and my projects keep piling up and as a result I am not able to read as much as I’d like and can no longer keep Pagan Bookworm going on my own. I will leave the site up as a resource for witches and pagans, but new reviews will now be posted on my personal blog: The Witch of Forest Grove.
New Year Blessings to All!
Sarah
Filed under: News | 1 Comment »
For all you podcast fans out there here is the chance to vote for your favourites to give them an award they deserve for all their hard work! Out of the many nominees, only two Pagan podcasts were selected, those being the wonderful Wigglian Way in the Religion & Inspiration category and Jason Pitzl-Waters’ A Darker Shade of Pagan music podcast in the Podsafe Music category (you may also know Jason from his Wild Hunt Blog).
Here’s how the voting works: you can vote once in each category every 24 hours – voting every day for 15 days starting today. This means you can vote for both The Wigglian Way and A Darker Shade of Pagan every day while the voting is open. Last year was the first year a Pagan podcast was nominated in four years, but they unfortunately lost, and now that there are two nominated let’s change that outcome!
Filed under: News, Podcasts | Tagged: Pagan podcast, Paganism, podcast awards, podcasting, Podcasts | Leave a Comment »
Feri witch, siren, songstress, storyteller and babe are all ways to descibe the lovely Sharon Knight. A singer-songwriter for over a decade as both a solo act and the rock fusion band Pandemonaeon based out of San Francisco, Sharon Knight has been gracing audiences with her shadowy voice and poetic songwriting reminding one of classic poets like Yeats and Tennyson.
Incantation is Sharon’s first album released in 1996 and is a well-known classic in the Neopagan community for its lyrical songwriting of myth and magic transporting listeners to ancient groves of oak trees under a full moon’s light. Full of songs of gods, goddesses, spells and curses, Incantation is timeless as Celtic-influenced Pagan folk music. Sharon’s musical style, instruments, and songwriting remind me of the bards of old travelling from village to village with tales on their silver tongues. Songs that make this witch’s heart soar from this album include “Mother of the World”, “Lord Fenugreek”, “Bewitched”, and “13 Knots”.
All of Sharon Knight’s albums are still available for purchase from both CD Baby or iTunes as the full album or individual MP3’s – to purchase Incantation see Sharon’s Store.
Filed under: Music | Tagged: bardic, Celtic, folk, mythology, pagan music, Sharon Knight, storytelling, witchcraft | Leave a Comment »
The Gods of the Greeks by Carl Kerényi
Thames & Hudson Publishers, 1974-2009 (304 pages)
Perk your ears up O Hellenic reconstructionists and followers of the old Greek religion, this is a title you’ll want to know about – Wiccans too – I know how much you all love the Greek gods! If you haven’t heard his name before, Carl or Karl Kerényi is a well-known and acclaimed author of works on Greek mythology. This title I consider his pièce de résistance as it covers all the Greek gods from the creation of the universe and the Orphic mysteries to the coming of the Titans and other pre-Olympian deities, and then more extensively covering all the Olympian gods. Reading Kerényi’s Gods of the Greeks is a perfect way to learn about all of the Greek deities including their lineages, myths, and personalities. Kerényi is an enjoyable and thought provoking writer. He doesn’t just skim the surface, no, instead he goes very deep presenting a complete ancient Greek cosmology that may take multiple reads of this wonderful work to fully understand and appreciate the picture Kerényi is painting.
“The reader’s best plan, therefore, is not to absorb too much of this solid fare at a sitting, but to read only a few pages at a time – and preferably more than once, as he would read an ancient poem.“
– Carl Kerenyi
If you’re like me you may need to purchase two copies of Gods of the Greeks; one to keep for reference and one copy to read over and over that will become dog-eared and full of pencil underlining, bookmarks, and notes. Whether you follow the Greek gods or not, I still recommend this to any and all Pagans to read as there are so few complete remnants of the ancient polytheistic religions in existence. The Gods of the Greeks can help any follower of the old pantheons to understand the worship of and belief in Pagan gods as well as their place in pantheons across cultures. If this title isn’t enough to quench your thirst for knowledge on the Greek Gods then I would also recommend Kerényi’s other titles - Heroes of the Greeks, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, Dionysos, Prometheus, Athene: Virgin and Mother in the Greek Religion, Hermes: Guide of Souls, and the out of print Goddesses of Sun and Moon. ♥
Filed under: Books - Non Fiction | Tagged: Carl Kerenyi, Greek Mythology, Hellenismos, Karl Kerenyi, mythology, Polytheism | 1 Comment »
The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind by Claude Lecouteux
Inner Traditions, 2009 (238 pages)
Lecouteux is the author of the acclaimed Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages and he just recently released a new book this Spring following a similar theme, but this time focusing on the beliefs and practices regarding death and the soul after death within Norse Paganism. If you are a Heathen, a Germanic reconstructionist, or an Ásatrúar you will love Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead. His work focuses on the Middle Ages delving back to Pagan times in Northern Europe and while Return of the Dead is mainly focused on Germanic beliefs and ancestor worship Lecouteux also provides examples from the Roman religion as well as Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon England. This is a very well researched work full of quotes and lore from history, legal records, Pagan literature, and the Eddas and Sagas. The author’s goal, I believe, is to shift the perception of our modern culture and society’s views of death, ghosts, and spirits to the views of the pre-Christian Pagan mind. Through Lecouteux’s research you will learn about revenants and Pagan’s dreadful fear of them — of the dead coming back to life — and also how this fear led to an entire body of afterlife beliefs and complex funerary rituals to ensure the passage of the souls of the dead to the other realms and prevent them being trapped in our material realm.
If you’ve ever desired to learn about ancestor worship in Germanic Paganism or the Pagan beliefs in the underworld, the soul, ghosts, spirits, reincarnation, and the deities that govern such things, The Return of the Dead will change your perceptions and show you an ancient body of tradition and belief that can still be found today within some of our modern practices. Even better, this work will show the reader how to approach death from a polytheistic Pagan perspective and reading The Return of the Dead just may change your funeral plans. If you are a fan of Lecouteux’s writing, you will be happy to hear he will be continuing on in his supernatural theme with a new book, The Secret History of Vampires: Their Multiple Forms and Hidden Purposes, set to be released in March of 2010.
Filed under: Books - Non Fiction | Tagged: academic, ancestors, death, ghosts, history, Norse, Norse mythology, Paganism, spirits, Vikings | Leave a Comment »
