Phyllis Curott does not spare herself in this candid and insightful book about her own journey with love and sexuality. She writes about how women sell themselves out, often without realizing it, for the sake of a love relationship. It's not about men betraying women - it's about unreal expectations women have about what love is really all about. It's about growing up, facing ourselves, and becoming women who can love freely because we are taking care of ourselves. And it is about allowing men to be who they are, without expecting them to don the armor and jump on the white horse to ride to our rescue.
Men will gain great insights into how women think and feel about the cultural messages we are given about their roles in love and marriage. Men will find themselves challenged to assess their own inner mythologies about women - the damsel in distress who needs to be saved, or the oft-lived pattern of looking for a woman to be more of a mother than a partner.
Relationship truly begins when we can face our own patterns and accept ourselves, and those we love, for who they are.
Interspersed in the narrative are her magical experiences with the inner lover - the part of us that holds the energy of the opposite, and which must merge with us in the Sacred Marriage for us to be whole.
Beautifully written. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is on a path of consciousness. You do not need to be pagan to appreciate this important and timeless story of spiritual freedom.
This book was the least erotic book about sexuality I've ever read. I think that Phyllis Curott has a lot of wisdom and insight to offer the Wiccan/Pagan community, and I will gladly praise "Witch Crafting" to no end. However, Curott's prose books have been disappointing and uneven at best. It's too dreamlike, never quite alive and vital.
For starters, Curott writes in a rose-colored gleam that reads like a sloppy romance novel. The prose is dull and without any visceral imagery. The vocabulary is limited, and there were no passages that stood out or grabbed my attention. I found myself grimacing at the love/sex scenes because the metaphors were overdone and badly written. When I noticed the same two-page section at both ends of the novel, it read less like an interesting literary technique and more like, "not this again!"
On a second note, I had a similar gripe here as I did when I read "Book of Shadows." I feel that Ms. Curott tends to idealize herself when writing in memoir form, or at least not address her own faults in a way that makes her human and relatable to the reader. Real people have faults other than being too supportive or too strong/masculine/warriorlike. I also got this feeling from many of the female characters of the book, whom Curott writes as being above reproach or without any true flaws. Also, while I do understand the insight that a mentor might bring, Nonna's guidance is too perfect and bow-tied. The repeated question / answer format of their conversations was completely uninvolving to read. Curott's characters are again too stock-format, not interesting and layered at all. They read like archetypes, which might be interesting if this were not supposed to be a memoir. I would assume that the people these characters were based on would be much more fleshed out than Curott portrays them to be.
Again, her treatment of men in general was lopsided. While she does MILES better than she did in her previous memoir (in which men were practically demonized across the board), here, a particular aspect of masculinity was idealized-- think romance novel hero, which is not particularly realistic. Neither portrayal of men is a complete, nuanced, or accurate portrait of masculinity, and it reads as false.
The good points include a good commentary on how to integrate the Divine masculine into the life of woman, which is a topic that is often ignored in today's Craft writing. She illuminates the concept of personal daemon in a way that made me want to research further. The passage wherein she travels to Italy is intricately connected to this concept, and it the bright spot of both the novel and Curott's prose, in my opinion.
Again, I think Curott has a lot to offer, and her research is clearly done. If she were to work in prose form again, I'd suggest a co-author or a good editor to help flesh out her work a little more.
