A valuable resource for planning a magical itinerary—or exploring the landscape of witchcraft from the couch.
A historian travels far beyond Salem in search of lingering marks of witchcraft’s past.
In Witches, Sluts, Feminists (2017), Sollée, a writer and curator who teaches gender studies at the New School, offered a quick introduction to centuries of misogyny and the ways in which superficially distinct categories of womanhood overlap. In her latest book, she takes readers on a tour of physical sites with witchy pasts in Europe, the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. The author provides historical and geographic specificity that is often elided and obscured in popular depictions of witchcraft—including those by self-described witches. Some locales in the book have turned their connections with witchcraft into kitschy pastiches of shops and attractions, but even in those places, Sollée digs into the history that lies beneath the tourist trap. The author’s trip to Germany is emblematic of her journey as a whole. When she climbed the highest peak in the Harz Mountains, she was visiting a place sacred to Saxon pagans, the setting for a diabolical orgy in Goethe’s Faust, and the site of an annual gathering of contemporary witches. In Thale, Sollée went to a theme park where she saw “statues of a naked Devil and witch that children were treating like jungle gyms.” The medieval village of Quedlinburg offers a quiet contrast to the sensational entertainments of Thale, but this storybook town executed so many accused witches that it’s the source for the oft-repeated and ahistorical suggestion that millions of women died during the witch hunts of the early modern era. This is clearly written for a general audience, but Sollée’s judicious use of scholarly sources adds weight to the text and serves as a guide to readers who want to learn more.
A valuable resource for planning a magical itinerary—or exploring the landscape of witchcraft from the couch.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-57863-699-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A stirring, lyrical meditation on transfiguration.
The quest for illumination, examined by an English philosopher.
Critchley, who admits to being “temperamentally a mystic,” celebrates the “cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits…and stand with what is there ecstatically,” a process that has come to be known, sometimes pejoratively, as mysticism. The word itself, he reveals, emerged from the 17th century’s “modern, enlightened worldview” to describe “an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” This feeling of ecstasy, Critchley asserts, has the potential of liberating us “from misery, from melancholy, from heaviness of soul, from the slough of despond, from mental leadenness.” Although mystics report intense experiences of what they call God, Critchley argues that mysticism can transcend religion to be primarily aesthetic: joy and rapture can be inspired by art, poetry, and, especially for him, music. In his journey into mysticism, Critchley draws on the writings of mystics, including Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Margery Kempe, Meister Eckhart, and contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. For Critchley, Dillard’s Holy the Firm and Eliot’s Four Quartets explore “the relation between art and the divine.” Both writers struggle to convey “some dimension of experience that cannot be expressed verbally and is perhaps closer to music.” Critchley is moved by any music that “triggers the energy of religious conversion”: the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, for example, and the Krautrock group Neu! “We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux of money that presses in on all sides,” Critchley writes. “Yet, when we listen to the music that we love, it is as if the world were reanimated, bursting with sense, and utterly alive.” Erudite and impassioned, Critchley’s intimate examination of mysticism speaks to a yearning for personal transformation and nothing less than enchantment.
A stirring, lyrical meditation on transfiguration.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781681378244
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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