Category: Witch’s Bookshelf

What it is: A slim, rigorous, deeply practical guide to folk witchcraft rooted in animism, familiar spirit work, and land-based practice

This book arrived in the community quietly. A small, independently published volume from a press most people hadn’t heard of, with a plain cover and no marketing budget to speak of. It found its audience entirely by word of mouth, passing between practitioners who pressed it on each other the way you press a book on a friend when you have just read something that articulates what you’ve been trying to articulate for years.

Roger J. Horne comes from two specific lineages, Scottish cunning craft and Appalachian herb-doctoring. And Folk Witchcraft reflects both. It is, in the best possible sense, a book that knows exactly where it comes from. Horne is not assembling a synthesis of world traditions or

There is a particular kind of book that becomes furniture. Not in the dismissive sense. In the sense that it is simply always there, always open, always consulted, until its spine breaks and you buy another copy because you cannot imagine working without it. Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs is that kind of book. It has been in print for over forty years. There are practitioners who have worn through five copies.

The book does not teach you how to work magic. Cunningham is honest about this from the introduction – it is a reference, not a course. What it gives you is the accumulated folk knowledge of centuries, distilled into accessible entries for over 400 herbs, each noting the plant’s common and scientific names, planetary and elemental associations, gender, deity correspondences,

The image depicted here is an AI-generated representation of The Crooked Path by Kelden. As I do not have permission to republish any image of the book and I honestly don’t need any copyright issues.

The Crooked Path: An Introduction to Traditional Witchcraft by Kelden · Published by Llewellyn Worldwide, 2020 · ISBN 978-0738762036 · Available everywhere books are sold

If you have spent any time in witchcraft spaces online, you have probably noticed a growing divide. On one side: Wicca and its many eclectic descendants, the tradition most people encounter first. On the other: Traditional Witchcraft. Older, thornier, less codified, and significantly harder to find a clear entry point into. Most of the serious books on the subject are either dense academic texts, obscure small-press publications, or written by British practitioners working from a very specific regional lineage that can feel remote to a newcomer.

The Crooked Path by Kelden was written to close that gap.

It is not a book of death. It is a book of becoming.

The title was coined by a German Egyptologist in 1842 – Das Todtenbuch – and it stuck, even though it misses the point entirely. The ancient Egyptians called it Reu Nu Peret Em Hru: “The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.” A manual not for dying, but for moving through darkness and emerging on the other side transformed.

That distinction matters. It shapes everything about how you read it.

What It Is
The Book of the Dead is a collection of spells, prayers, hymns, and ritual instructions used in ancient Egypt from roughly 1550 BCE through the first century BCE. A span of over 1,500 years. It is not one fixed text. It is a living tradition: a pool of around 200 spells from which individual copies were assembled, personalized, and commissioned for specific people.

No two copies are identical.

The Carmina Gadelica, also known as Charms of the Gaels, is a compendium of prayers, hymns, charms, incantations, blessings, folk poems, songs, proverbs, and miscellaneous lore gathered in the Gàidhealtachd regions of Scotland between 1860 and 1909. (Wikipedia)

Alexander Carmichael was a civil servant and exciseman whose work took him throughout the Highlands and Islands, and he spent those decades sitting with people in their homes, listening, and recording what was being said and sung in a tradition that was already beginning to disappear.

The Original Six-Volume Set
Carmichael himself was responsible for the first two volumes, published in 1900. His daughter Ella re-edited them in 1928.

Further volumes were edited by his grandson James Carmichael Watson and published in 1940 and 1941. A fifth volume was edited by Professor Angus Matheson in 1954, and the series was completed in 1971 with a sixth volume containing a lengthy glossary and indices.( Wikipedia)