Review — Whispers of the Moon
Sam's review of Whispers of the Moon.
A 2000 review of Whispers of the Moon by David Harrington and deTraci Regula (Llewellyn, 1996), the biography of Scott Cunningham, who died of AIDS in 1993 at thirty-seven. Sam frames the loss in terms of sheer output: alongside the pulp novels and commercial articles that paid the bills, Cunningham left fifteen magical books, translated into eleven languages, whose reach across the Pagan community would be felt for years.
The biographical sketch runs through a life spent in San Diego: an introduction to the Craft at fifteen through the witch Dorothy Jones; the American Traditionalist Wicca that grew out of it and fed his best-known book, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner; a lifelong fascination with the magical properties of herbs; and thirteen years of teaching, classes, and videos undertaken despite never much enjoying it. By the early eighties he had grown impatient with what he called living-room Wicca and struck out as a solitary, wanting to put the Pagan back in the countryside — an impulse Sam credits for the vividness that made the books so popular.
Sam then takes up the standard objection, that Cunningham compiled rather than created. His herbal work went through several print incarnations before becoming Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, and later branched into incenses, oils, brews, stones, metals and foods. Sam's answer is that compilation is a necessary stage in a young discipline: organising scattered material into something usable is itself creative, and Cunningham's care as a researcher means the resulting reference can be trusted. He closes on what the biography offers Pagans as a model — a working writer who reached real economic footing in occult publishing, who encouraged others toward their own power rather than waiting for perfect conditions, and who argued patiently and in detail against baneful magic. Whether or not the portrait is idealised, Sam writes, matters less than the fact that the ideal is worth holding up.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →