Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

From the section "Beginning Your Journey": "But you don't have to be born into a family of Witches, or initiated in a secret ritual, to be a Witch. There are hundreds of ways of being one." Anyone can call himself anything he wants. Witchcraft is an unregulated field, as is the vocabulary of magic. In my long-practiced view, there are not hundreds of ways of being a Witch. There are the two ways mentioned above, in which case the gift will either be in your blood, or passed on to you. There is a third: despite no family heritage of such, being born with a gift for witchcraft (it happens, but rarely). If those three ways are closed to you, you are essentially out of luck. This book cannot give you any of them, and books, themselves, do not constitute a fourth path. The hundreds of other paths of "witchcraft" are a mixture of ego-aggrandizement, self-delusion, and attempted self-help . . . and slick marketing, confused word usage, and related commercial chicanery, naturally. This book is very hoodoo, santeria, curandismo influenced in its herb usage and magical practice. Which makes sense, since the author is of Cuban descent. She states that she is from a long line of Witch Healers, which puts me in mind that she is from a family of curanderas. Which is awesome and beautiful and powerful and admirable. But Witchery, an Anglo-Saxon/Germanic magical and religious practice, is not curandismo, or hoodoo or santeria. The herbs are different, the magical practice is different, the worldview is different. No Witch uses Cinnamon in a love spell. Over the hundreds of years that the spells of witchery developed, Witches did not have access to Cinnamon. What did they have? Willow withes, Birch leaves, Rose petals, the leaves of sorceror's violet (Vinca). I could list many other examples where Witchery uses the same herbs in different ways. Bay leaves would not be used for banishing night spirits; you would use Rosemary, or Salt, or Broomstraw for that. Even better, a brooch of thin Rowan twigs. Witchery uses much more in the way of trees than rootwork practice. That's what we had easy access to. Anyway, this book is really rootwork-lite for the masses. It should not have been called "Witchery." If you are interested in rootwork, you will learn it better, elsewhere, without the corruption of other traditions.