Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Are you looking for a book that's going to tell you about how to mix traditional magical oils? Learn about the correspondences between essential oils and the intangible and Divine? This isn't the book for you. Now, granted, the author has cited her sources, which is why she gets two stars instead of one. But the oil recipes....no. Just no. They appear to have been pulled from a mixed bag of sources, including Cunningham, Slater, Marlborough, and others, with a result that is at times just BAFFLING. It's a slap-dash mix of traditions and recipes without any sense of consistency. Lavender as a jinx-breaker? Bayberry for cursing? Bay laurel for Black Devil oil? *MAKING* graveyard dust with herbs? None of this is traditional, none of this is accepted in modern Pagan or hoodoo correspondences, and the fact that people may buy this book and think the information in it is accurate actually PAINS me. The author is also convinced that synthetic oils are A-OK for magical purposes. Which, again, no. Both Pagan and hoodoo correspondences are about plants - bayberry (for example) is almost always job or money related. Not bayberry scent, not synthetic bayberry - BAYBERRY. The plant. From which you can obtain an essential oil (though it's ungodly expensive) and mix with other essential oils - each with it's own correspondence - to create magical oils. Synthetic oils might smell the same, but they're not natural. They're not taken from the plant. Which means that magically speaking, they're pretty much useless. And feel free to wave me away as one nutcase purist, but go poke around in some of the older, respected oil books and you'll see the same thing - synthetics have no place in magick. Not to mention that a lot of people use magical oils for candle magick, and most synthetic fragrance oils contain petroleum solvents that produce carcinogens when burned. Avoid, unless you desperately need to see the depths to which Llewellyn has sunk in it's effort to force authors to pad out their manuscripts. To use a terrible, terrible Internet phrase: I am disappoint.