Positive Magic: Ancient Metaphysical Techniques for Modern Lives Book

TL;DR - I have some disagreements with this book, but you should read it if you want to understand magic.

Positive Magic is an excellent primer for anyone seriously looking into practicing magic. It offers a broad overview of the philosophical, spiritual, psychological and, most importantly, practical implementation of magic in daily life. What I like best about Weinstein's seminal work is how she cuts right through the bullshit from the beginning. This is not a book of fun spells. This is a book of work. She shows you the planning, practice, and patience of accepting magic as a legitimate means of improving your life. She even goes a long way towards showing how magic is really about attitude and perception and in many ways is psychological in nature.

Not only does she realistically break down how magic should be approached, she provides some excellent specifics for incorporating it today without further reading. The Words of Power section alone is all anyone might ever need to find great personal progress. But there are decent starter guides for Astrology, the I Ching, and the Tarot here too. I can't speak to the information in the first two sections, but everything she discusses with the Tarot is of excellent quality.

I particularly liked her repeated emphasis on personal responsibility and working only for oneself and for personal fulfillment, as well as the way she took shots again and again at the scammers and overly-credulous who often give modern Witchcraft a bad name. I will say it again: this is the real stuff. This is work. You don't just light a candle and say some words. Oh wait, you do. But not the way the average goth teenager thinks. I can say that because I was that goth teenager once upon a time, and it's taken me many years of study and spiritual searching to overcome that naive, credulous child who just wanted to be special and powerful.

With all that being said...something about this book rubs me the wrong way. I think it comes down to a spiritual aspect of the topics Weinstein covers. She doesn't miss much -- karma, reincarnation, pantheistic deity concepts and affirmative, holistic communion...etc. But, for me, she takes the credo of personal responsibility/karma too far. It's one thing to believe that we are responsible for our own actions and perceptions, for the end result of our dollop of soul, but totally another to say that we are responsible even for drawing all the negative events that might occur to us into our lives.

An example: Weinstein gives an example of a woman who almost gets hit by a car that swerves near her, and the angry driver of said car yells at her. She then goes on to conclude that this woman drew the anger of the driver and near-accident into her own life because she was angry at her boyfriend. Her own anger created the right environment for another's anger to be directed towards her at random.

My first thought about this is: What? What? I...what? Are you saying that every bad thing that happens is literally due to our own spiritual energies, regardless of how indirect or coincidental? In fact, yes, she is. Early in the book, Weinstein clearly states that even people who are dying of cancer chose that death (maybe in a past life) and drew it to them.

Sorry, I just can't get with that. I'm all about karma and reincarnation and personal responsibility but that is too far for me. Sometimes, bad shit happens to people for no good reason. "Bad shit happens" is not at all contradictory with the Pagan/Witchcraft belief system. The Goddess, Shakti, the Oneness, the central Creative Force, whatever, is EVERYTHING. Everything. Order and chaos. Causation and randomness. Good and bad. Brigit and Morrigan. Whatever perspective floats your boat. I, personally, me, I cannot accept a perspective that does not recognize that the chaotic darkness aspect of the universe is as real as the glowy eternal fulfillment-of-all part, and everything in between, and that it doesn't really matter, since it's all the same thing and all me and all you all together in the end, if there ever is one.

Sometimes, where there were stars, there are now black holes.

Soooo....yeah. There's that. I guess it boils down to a personal disagreement on total causation and spirituality. Which is not to say that this isn't a great book. In fact, Weinstein is so well-informed and informative that I would welcome the chance to discuss my conflict with her ideas sometime. I have lots of thoughts about how an extended conversation on the metaphysics of human experience might lead to a resolution...but ah, I rarely get to have these imaginary conversations for real.

My other minor pet peeve with this (and I have to call this out because it appears so often in new age Witchcraft books) is the inclusion of some revisionist/wishful history at the beginning. While it could be true, and is in fact likely, that many of the practices and traditions of modern Paganism and Witchcraft pre-date monotheistic religions and were deliberately targeted by Christianity over the course of European history, we have no conclusive evidence of such. People are still arguing over whether British Druids conducted blood sacrifices. We only know glimmers, hints, of the religions and magics that were practiced in many parts of the world before an organized Church took hold.

The sooner everyone in the Pagan movement can accept this and move on to the more amazing, interesting fact that we are in the process of creating a edited, revised, modern, holistic,
syncretic, ever-changing, personal, NEW system of belief, the better off we will all be.

/soapbox

#longreviewislong