Encountering the Dark Goddess on Book Depository

Pre-orders of Encountering the Dark Goddess: A Journey into the Shadow Realms can now be made through Book Depository.

The Dark Goddess is often associated with the Underworld where she leads the uninitiated through a transformative journey of self-discovery, change and soul renewal. She is connected with the unwanted, the forgotten, the ignored or even ashamed parts of our psyche. However there is more to her than that. 

Encountering the Dark Goddess: A Journey into the Shadow Realms guides you through what this challenging facet of the Divine Feminine, the Dark Goddess, is truly about, and encourages you to step through the veils into her hidden realm to explore 13 aspects of herself. 

2020: Life in Retrograde AWC Conference

Due to COVID-19 a lot of events scheduled for this year have had to be postponed, cancelled or move on line. The annual Australian Wiccan Conference (AWC), scheduled to be take place over the weekend of Friday, 11 to Sunday 13 September 2020, is one such event. Instead of cancelling the event altogether, this year's conference will be moving online and will consist of a selection of panels, workshops and debates that have taken place during the 35 years that the conference has been running.

I will be presenting a workshop on The Dark Gods on Sunday, 13 September 2020 at 12 noon (Australian Eastern Standard Time) that I originally presented at the 2011 conference that took place in Tasmania.

Books, Covid-19 and Devotional Works

I recently sat down with Rebecca Buchanan where she asked me about my devotional work with various deities, including the Dark Goddess, how my spiritual practice has been affected by Covid-19, as well as my writing projects, both past and upcoming projects.

Rebecca is a pagan poet and author of fairy tales, fantasy, horror, romance and science fiction.

My interview with Rebecca can be found here.

I first became acquainted with Rebecca through her involvement with Bibliotheca Alexandria, who have published a number of anthologies that I had contributed essays and poetry towards including:

Unto Herself: A Devotional Anthology for Independent Goddesses (includes my essay on Neith),

Contemporary Witchcraft will be setting the foundations

As I write in the introduction to Contemporary Witchcraft: Foundational Practices for a Magical Life, much appears to have changed since the early 1990s when I took my first steps into the world of contemporary witchcraft (then generally referred to as Wicca). Back then the neophyte (beginner) was expected to learn how to render the “veils” between this world and the mystical one by applying themselves to the work in order to understand these mysteries. 

 My initial instruction not only focused on the practical application of ritual and magick, but also the “behind the scenes” information, providing an insight into the psychological changes, as well as what is actually happening on the astral level. It is this understanding that enabled me to gain a stronger belief in the magical work that I was undertaking – a belief that also proved to be most beneficial during dark nights of the soul, the times of doubt when the logical mind saw me questioning what I had been dedicating much of my adult life to. 

These days Wicca has almost become a generalised term for neo-paganism, which often includes an assortment of New Age practices, as opposed to focusing on the initiatory teachings that stem from the original vision that its founder, Gerald Gardner, and later, Alex Sanders, had. Despite what seems to be a copious amount of information available today, much tends to be the same material regurgitated without any real instruction as to why or even how certain techniques are done, let alone any form of acknowledgment as to where the information was originally obtained. There also seems to be an increasing belief of “anything goes” and “do what you feel”, resulting very much in a self-styled form of witchcraft with an emphasis on using one’s own intuition, as opposed to older foundational work.

Times may have changed, as have the needs and desires of people, and whilst spiritual practices also have changed, this does not necessarily mean that all of the original vision Gardner had is outdated and needs to be discarded. As the saying goes, we do not have to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. When it comes to magick, there are still aspects and techniques that simply can only be learnt over time through the practice of the magical art. Such things cannot really be taught through the pages of a book or the internet. There are other aspects of magick that are best taught under physical instruction of a trained practitioner as opposed to a handful of inexperienced novices boasting about their alleged successes.

Contemporary Witchcraft: Foundational Practices for a Magical Life will be published by Moon Books mid to late 2021.