by Jason Mankey
Curtis, Gregory. The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Since this book was released, a lot of new information has come to light about the painted caves in France, Spain, and Portugal, and they keep finding new ones, many of which are older than the previously discovered ones.
Dalrymple, William. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. I picked up this book on a lark at Heathrow Airport while heading home from London, and finished it while flying over Greenland. If you are wondering what true polytheistic culture might look like, this book is a great place to start. Captivating.
Daniélou, Alain. The Phallus: Sacred Symbol of Male Creative Power. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1995. This book is focused primarily on phallus imagery in India and Asia, so it didn’t really apply to this work, but for those wanting a little more phallus mythology, it’s worth picking up. This book might be even more valuable for its images than its text. There are some absolutely beautiful pictures here, most in full color.
D’Aulaire, Ingri, and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. Did you own a copy of this book as a kid? I did not, but I checked it out from my elementary school library two dozen times. I still enjoy reading it, even if some of it is now humorous to me.
Deo Mercurio. “Kapnonoy: to Carnonos.” http://www.deomercurio.be/en
/cernunnos.html#carnonon. This website is dedicated to all religious things Gaulish. The page there on Cernunnos is quite satisfying.
Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Highly recommended if you want to know about Hinduism or gods such as Shiva. While written for a general audience, this is still a challenging book, and you might want to take notes to keep things from getting confusing as you go through the different eras of Indian history.
Don’s Maps: Resources for the Study of Paleolithic/Paleolithic European, Russian and Australian Archaeology/Archeology. https://www.donsmaps.com. Do you like ancient shit? You’ll love Don’s Maps. There’s just a treasure trove of information to be found there. In particular, see “Tools from the Stone Age,” https://www.donsmaps.com/tools.html.
Dunn, Patrick. The Orphic Hymns: A New Translation for the Occult Practitioner. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2018. This is a terrific book, and includes not only Dunn’s wonderful translations but also some history on the Orphic Hymns, along with suggestions for using them in magickal ritual. It also includes the original English translations by Thomas Taylor from 1792.
Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? New York: Harper Collins, 2012. For those interested in Jesus and ancient religions, I can’t recommend Ehrman enough. He’s easily understood, not an Evangelical, and yet acknowledges that the historical Jesus was most likely a real person. In the Pagan community, there’s a tendency to dismiss the historicity of Jesus, a view that is not supported by most scholars of the New Testament.
Elliot, Ben, Becky Knight, and Aimée Little. “Antler Frontlets.” In Star Carr, Volume 2: Studies in Technology, Subsistence and Environment, edited by Nicky Milner, Chantal Conneller, and Barry Taylor, 297–333. York: White Rose University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.22599/book2.l.
Farrar, Janet, and Stewart Farrar. The Witches’ God. Custer, WA: Phoenix, 1989. Please don’t think I’m picking on the Farrars because of my citation in the text. I love the Farrars! A Witches’ Bible remains a big favorite of mine, and this book, along with its companion volume, The Witches’ Goddess, were hugely influential in my life. Eight Sabbats for Witches was published in 1981 and The Witches’ Way in 1984, with the two books later republished in one volume as A Witches’ Bible in 1996.
Fitch, Eric. In Search of Herne the Hunter. Chieveley, UK: Capall Bann, 1994. This is one of the best books ever produced on the Horned God. Since Fitch’s book is focused squarely on Herne, it covers a lot of ground I didn’t get to in this book, specifically some really strange ghost stories from around the Windsor Forest that may involve Herne. Highly recommended! I love this book wholeheartedly. The co-founder of Capall Bann Publishing, Jon Day, passed away in 2015, and with him Capall Bann, so everything from them is quickly becoming a collector’s item.
Flecker, James Elroy. The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker. Edited by J. C. Squire. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916. I quote the poem “Oak and Olive” in this book.
Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore. New York: Gramercy, 1993. This particular edition features the abridged version from 1922. I know some Witches find Frazer to be a bore to read, I’m not one of them. I think his prose is poetic and illuminating, but only if you are really interested in a particular topic Frazer is writing about. Frazer is very much a product of his time, which is a nice way of saying that much of the text comes across as racist.
Gardner, Gerald. Witchcraft Today. London: Rider and Company, 1954. I wish I had the Rider edition of this book. What I have is a 1999 edition from I-H-O Books that has incorrect page numbers; though, according to Amazon, copies are selling for two hundred bucks today, this edition is not worth five bucks, let alone two hundred. Luckily, Witchcraft Today is available for free online, as is Gardner’s 1959 The Meaning of Witchcraft, which was originally published by Aquarian Press in London. Despite its availability online, I still have a hard copy of Meaning from 1991 published by Magickal Childe out of New York City. Magickal Childe was the publishing house of the bookstore of the same name owned by Herman Slater. There are many Witches who think Gardner is required reading; I’m not one of them. For every five interesting things he says, there are four dozen pieces of poorly regurgitated Margaret Murray.
Gargett, Robert H., et al. “Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neandertal Burial [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology vol. 30, no. 2 (1989): 157–190. www.jstor.org/stable/2743544. The only benefit that came from writing this book during the Covid-19 quarantine of 2020 was that a great many scholarly journals offered free access during that period of time. That allowed me to sift through some academic journals, such as this one.
Gary, Gemma. The Devil’s Dozen: Thirteen Craft Rites of the Old One. London: Troy Books, 2015. Looking for more Traditional Witchcraft rites involving the Horned God? This is the book for you. Gemma Gary is one of the most influential authors writing today about Traditional Witchcraft, and that influence is well deserved. Her books are terrific.
Godwin, Joscelyn. The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2005. I’m a huge fan of Godwin’s various works. He once wrote a history of esoteric religions confined to Western New York, and it was illuminating! If you like seeing Pagan deities outside of the contexts we generally see them in, meaning the ancient world and the present, this book can’t be beat!
Gokhale, Namita. The Book of Shiva. New Delhi: Viking, 2001. I chose to leave Shiva out of this work, but he appeared in my first attempt at a Horned God book many years ago. This book is not cited in the text but is included here for those looking for more information on my favorite Indian deity.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. I probably read at least parts of Willows in elementary school, but I have no real memories of meeting the Piper at the Gates of Dawn back then. Instead, my first real read of Willows occurred in my mid-twenties, after embracing Witchcraft and Paganism. When I do workshops on the Horned God, I often end with the Grahame passages quoted in this book, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that reading it generally makes me cry. If someone were to ask me to sum up the Horned God in under five hundred words, I’d just quote that bit from Grahame.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. This book was first published in 1948. My edition was published in 2001. I find Graves difficult reading, but his work had a tremendous impact on
Modern Witchcraft, inspiring practitioners like Robert Cochrane and others.
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft. 2nd ed. New York: Facts on File, 1999. I’m always amazed by the sheer amount of information in this book; it really lives up to its title. Rosemary passed suddenly in 2019, but I was lucky enough to meet her at the HexFest gathering in New Orleans in 2018. I’m thankful to Christian Day and Brian Cain, the organizers of HexFest, for affording me that opportunity.
Hayden, Brian. Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003. There are a lot of things wrong with this book, the biggest one being that Hayden seems to be working from a twenty-year-old playbook when it comes to his interpretations of things. However, there’s a lot of information in this book, and it’s lavishly illustrated for what is essentially a textbook. I like it because of the amount of stuff in it, which provides a great starting point, and from there you can sort of draw your own conclusions.
Hirst, K. Kris. “Qafzeh Cave, Israel: Evidence for Middle Paleolithic Burials.” ThoughtCo. Updated November 18, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/qafzeh-cave-israel-middle-paleolithic-burials-172284. This is not my usual go-to website when it comes to history, but the information was accurate, and it contained a lot of links.
Hughes, Virginia. “Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” National Geographic. October 9, 2013. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/. Were the first artists mostly women? The answer seems to be yes!
Hugin the Bard. A Bard’s Book of Pagan Songs: Stories and Music from the Celtic World. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1996. When this was originally released, it came with a CD of Hugin singing all the songs in the book. The copy of the CD is long gone at the Mankey household. If you have a copy of it, shoot me an email, because I’ve never heard it!
Huson, Paul. Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks & Covens. New York: Perigee Books, 1980. Originally published in 1970. Huson’s book has had an extraordinary impact on Witchcraft, and fifty years after its initial publication, there’s still nothing else like it.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Ronald Hutton released an updated version of this seminal work in 2019 as I was in the process of writing this book. If you find yourself intrigued by the rebirth of Pan in the nineteenth century, Hutton’s summary of that information is far more detailed than what is in this book. I’ll also admit that I’ve read this book so many times that I sometimes quote directly from it without a second thought.
———. Pagan Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. In many ways, this is an updated version of Hutton’s earlier Pagan Religions of the British Isles but with more depth and the latest in research. If you say you like Celtic stuff, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
———. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. An exhaustive and illuminating journey through the holidays celebrated in Great Britain and often beyond.
———. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. I remember this particular Hutton book as being difficult early on but a great read after the first few chapters. There are some really interesting things in this book that suggest some fascinating Pagan survivals, specifically spectral female visitors who come in the night, which might have played a role in the development of the Wild Hunt.
———. Witches, Druids, and King Arthur. London: Hambledon & London, 2003.
Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Jackson, Nigel. The Masks of Misrule: The Horned God & His Cult in Europe. Chieveley, UK: Capall Bann, 1996. Not that this book is crazy old, but it’s old enough that Capall Bann changed addresses between when this was published and some of their later titles. I didn’t quote Masks in this book, but if you’re looking for a history of the Horned God more grounded in mythology and connected to just about everything over the last two thousand years, you’ll love this book.
Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Press, 2002. There are many biographies about Crowley that have been written. This one is my favorite.
Keats, John. The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats. Edited by Harry Buxton Forman. London: Reeves & Turner, 1889. Keats’s “Hymn to Pan” is a part of the much longer Endymion. The Pan stuff is fabulous. I want to stage an entire ritual using it in my backyard.
Kelden. The Crooked Path: An Introduction to Traditional Witchcraft. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2020. I don’t think anyone writes about Traditional Witchcraft more clearly than Kelden. If you find yourself confused about what Traditional Witches actually do and how to set up a ritual, Kelden is your best bet!
Kerenyi, Carl. Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. I prefer Otto’s work, but this is great too, and has more in the way of illustrations. Highly recommended if you like looking at ancient Greek pottery.
Lady Sheba. The Grimoire of Lady Sheba. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 2001. Hardcover edition. Sheba’s original Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows was released in 1971, and an extended version was issued the following year as The Grimoire of Lady Sheba. If you’re interested in a Sheba book, pick up Grimoire, because it has more stuff in it.
Leek, Sybil. The Complete Art of Witchcraft. New York: Signet, 1973. The hardcover edition of this book was published in 1971 by the World Publishing Company. For a period of nearly twenty-five years, Sybil Leek was one of the most influential Witches living in the US (and before that England). She released perhaps over a hundred books in her lifetime (most of them about astrology) and was even on a TV game show back in the mid-1960s (you can find this on YouTube). Her written work hasn’t aged very well but is still worth picking up for its historical value. All of Leek’s work is now sadly out of print, and used copies of her mass-market paperback output often begin at thirty bucks. Dear publishers who might be reading this, I’m down to edit a Sybil Leek anthology if you can figure out the thorny copyright issues.
Leins, Ian. Celts: Art and Identity. London: British Museum Press, 2015. This book was released to coincide with The Celts exhibition hosted first by the British Museum in London and then the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where we caught the exhibit. The night before visiting, I caught a pretty nasty head cold on our trip, but nothing was going to keep me from seeing the Gundestrup cauldron. Post-museum trip, I went to bed and slept for the next eighteen hours. Useless information like me having a cold in Scotland is why some people enjoy reading my bibliographies.
Leland, Charles Godfrey. Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, 1899. There are lots of versions of Aradia out there, and many of them can be found (legally) online. My favorite is the Mario and Dina Pazzaglini edition that came out in 1998 through Phoenix Publishing, though I just yanked what I used in this book off the Sacred Texts website (https://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/aradia/index.htm). The Pazzaglini edition includes the original text, a new translation based on Leland’s notes (sadly, his original sources are nowhere to be found), and several informative essays.
Link, Luther. The Devil: The Archfiend in Art from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. This book more than lives up to its title. Not only is it full of art, but it’s full of history and explanation too. I weirdly own way too many books about the Christian Devil.
Livingstone, Josephine. “The Remarkable Persistence of the Green Man.” The New Yorker, March 7, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-remarkable-persistence-of-the-green-man. One of the most interesting things about this short article is that it’
s really more of a book review than a history of the Green Man, yet Livingstone includes several very informative paragraphs about the history of the Green Man that are mostly absent from other sources.
Lloyd, Michael G. Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan. Hubbardston, MA: Asphodel Press, 2012. Though I didn’t cite this book in the text, I was reading it while writing much of this book in the spring of 2020, and during that time I found myself appalled at the level of homophobia that was once a part of the Pagan community. I’ve always found my Wiccan-Witchcraft very LGBTQ+ inclusive, but that wasn’t always the case in certain circles and covens. This book is highly recommended for anyone wanting to know about our homophobic past. Don’t be put off by the title; while this is nominally a book on the life of New York Witch Ed Buczynski, it’s more a greater history of the New York Pagan scene in the 1970s, a history that has a very real overlap with the gay rights movement sparked by the Stonewall riots in 1969. Sorry for the long note here, but if you’re a history person, you should pick up this book. It’s well worth the investment in money and time.
Malotki, Ekkehart. Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. There are lots of books about Kokopelli, and while most of them have very little to say, that’s not the case here. Malotki explores the popular Kokopelli petroglyph, and the Hopi kachina Kookopölö, who is directly related to the image most of us are familiar with today. Kokopelli showed up in my first attempt at this book many years ago, and if you want to learn more about him, this is the place to start.
Mankey, Jason, and Laura Tempest Zakroff. The Witch’s Altar: The Craft, Lore & Magick of Sacred Space. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2018. Since this book was released just two months before my Transformative Witchcraft and Tempest’s wonderful Weaving the Liminal, we sometimes think of it as our “forgotten” book-baby, but we shouldn’t. This is a really fun book, if I do say so myself. Writing a book with Tempest was great. The only downside is that every once in a while, someone thinks we’re married as a result. (Tempest is married to Nathaniel and Jason is married to Ari.) There is also at least one footnote in this text referencing Transformative Witchcraft: The Greater Mysteries, which was published in January of 2019 by Llewellyn.