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    Witches of America
    Witches of America
    Witches of America
    Audiobook12 hours

    Witches of America

    Written by Alex Mar

    Narrated by Amanda Dolan

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When most people hear the word witches, they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, it's a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day witchcraft.


    Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; and a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9781494586454
    Witches of America
    Author

    Alex Mar

    Alex Mar was born and lives in New York City. She has contributed to the Believer, the Oxford American, Elle, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, New York Magazine, and other publications. She is the director of the documentary feature American Mystic and the author of Witches of America.

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    Reviews for Witches of America

    3.5/5

    51 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 5/5
      Alex Mar wrote a phenomenal insider's experience of various covens and personal experience with witches throughout America. This was very entertaining and kept me enthralled.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed and will give another listen. Hope she eventually does a follow up.
    • 5/5
      This was an incredible listen. It holds the answers. Many answers
    • 1/5
      I picked this up from the library at the same time as Hutton's Triumph of the Moon, in the hopes that it would bridge the 1999-present anthropological gap. It didn't.

      Uninspired writing, a weird obsession with bodies that reminds me of dark teenage ED thinking, and a totally disingenuous "seeker" narrative.

      Overall vibe? Insecure 30 something wants to write a book that sells, has a lot of body and class hangups, and hopes that vaguely exotic topic will mask her frankly boring writing.

      Alas. Shouldn't have expected academic tone from pop journalism.
    • 3/5
      This is a perplexing book. It's partially investigative journalism but partially spiritual conversion memoir, and it does neither 100% well exactly because the author doesn't know herself which category her experiences fall into. This will be of interest to those who are interested in America's religious minority communities, but likely not to others. I would be interested to see where Alex Mar lands in her religious journey in another 10 years and what her take on this book is, then.

      As a note, there is a disturbing section of this book that goes into a very dark subset of witchcraft including necromancy and graverobbing. I have read quite a bit about American Wicca and never came across anything like this before -- it's very disturbing and I truly hope we are reading the ravings of an unstable daydreamer rather than true acts (they are technically unverified by the author). This section is not for the squeamish.