The Pagan Experience WK 1- September 7: Books! Tell us about a favourite book. We come across many literary adventures as students of a spiritual path. Some become familiar companions; others reference sources. Some may have been what propelled you on your current spiritual journey, or took you in a completely different direction than what you had imagined. And, then there are those that speak to every level of your soul. What’s on your shelf?

I remember this black spell book with a silver ribbon to tie it together sitting in the lunch room of my childhood bestie’s mum’s work. It was a small book of Spells that you could buy through the work book program. I was too terrified to do most of the spells, but I do remember doing one. But that book coupled with as many fantasy books I could get my hands on from the town library is what drew me to this world.

I have a number of favourites that I keep going back to now. Beginning the Bardic Grade with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) and The Druidry Handbook helped me form the ground of my current path which began about 4 years ago, so listening to the Gwersu on my iPod is wonderful as it’s always on me. In Search of Herne the Hunter is an obvious one as it helped me gain an understanding of who Herne is.

Many Australian Pagans will tell you this, but we have a “continental isolation” (in fact, Wendy Rule made a song about it.) It’s feeling that the way we were raised and celebrate traditions doesn’t blend with the world and land that we live in. Being a “mongrel” Australian (2^nd-8^th generation, depending on what side of the family you look) this land is my home but my bloodline and family traditions come from the UK and the Netherlands. As such, I find myself going to books about Australian Indigenous spirituality and how they communicated with the land. Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime by Robert Lawlor is one book that I continuously go back to as it looks at society before White man came and screwed everything up. Wise Women of the Dreamtime: Aboriginal Tales of Ancestral Powers by K.Langloh Parker is another such book that I devoured when I first began trying to re-introduce femininity and Goddess back into my path.

On this topic, I want to draw your attention to an amazing film that’s currently in Post-Production. Westwind: Djalu’s Legacy is about the passing the knowledge of the ancient Songlines, and ancient dreaming, and just how important this tradition is and in a sad sense of reality, how easy it is to be consumed and leave tradition behind. (Click here to learn more about it and how you can help make it reality in post-production.)

I’m collecting a number of books I’m waiting for university to finish so I can read, such as Avalon Within, Women in Celtic Myth, Druidry and the Ancestors , Men and the Goddess and Aboriginal Men of High Degree. I’m sure you can see a pattern in my “to read” list! Then there’s also PaGaian Cosmology which arrived in the mail yesterday, and Call of the God which I’m excitedly apart of as two of my pieces are within that anthology!

I recently put together a bookshelf we’ve lugged around for a few years and that has been playing pin-board as it remained in it’s box. I’ve noticed that I have so many books that I don’t even use as reference anymore. Books that I once cherished (ie. anything Scott Cunningham, for example) have now been replaced with the likes of The Complete Guide to Aromatherapy and Visual Magick. 

And that’s okay! Those older books now find themselves safe in a storage tub in my wardrobe until such time that I decide to part with them, or pass them on.

At the end of the day, you can never have too many books!