The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries : Part II

Many books have appeared about witchcraft in the past few hundred years. Some were presenting the Craft as a curious pastime and highlighted only its "cookbook" aspects (how to get a lover and how to do your enemy in), but missed the dignity and majesty that the Earth religion contained. Some presented the Craft as a highly ceremonious pageantry where you needed to invest your life savings to get the proper tools, robes and glittering chalices, as if the power lay in the high quality of objects you needed. Such attitudes missed the humble common sense originating from the Craft, which made it such a desirable religion for peasants and Earth-loving folks. And then again, some books presented the Craft as a fossilized, hierarchical power structure, in which there are those who are "adepts" or "third degree" or otherwise achieved "guruhood." The rest of us folks just weren't fit to tie the laces on their sandals. Reminiscent of another religion or two? Precisely. Such books missed the all-pervading idea of human equality in the Craft. Lastly, there are many books which perverted the Craft to such a degree that in presenting it, they even forgot or "wrote out" the "major deity" concerned with Craft of the Wise, namely the Female Principle of the Universe. Those writers reflected their own sexism and fear of women, no matter how learned their books appeared. Taking out the heart of the theology destroyed people's images of the gentle path.