Witches Qabala: The Pagan Path and the Tree of Life

Would have received 5 if it were not for the swap of swords for wands, this is just not for me.

Very good

I really didn't like this book, I had read a book by Ellen Cannon Reed before this one and found her to be delightful in a very controversial way! So based on this I trusted that this book would be well written and accurate, also the slew of good reviews here also reassured me.I recently developed an interest in the Qabala and wanted to read around a western version of it however, I found this book to be awful in just about every possible way. The chapters are too short and lack depth of meaning -- the book is poorly laid out and one has to skip about five pages of diagrams to finish a paragraph that's been interrupted by a bunch of pictures of the Tree of Life. This kept happening and was exasperating to say the least.The explanations for each sphere are highly simplistic and didn't go into nearly enough depth. I also grew tired of 'the goddess this' 'the god that', I'm not a Wiccan so I found this profoundly irritating -- I'd gotten the impression from Reeds other books that she was a strict hard polytheist when it came to the gods; obviously she wasn't when she wrote this book.I suppose this book would be good for Wiccan's but even then I don't really believe it'll enlighten them that much given its poor content; for example, Reed attributes gods and goddesses/myths/colours etc to certain spheres but neglects to explain why she has done this. That's fair enough if she wanted people to think about it themselves but I just found it unhelpful and a bit of a cop-out, I mean what good is this book exactly?I'd recommend ' The Miracle Tree: Demystifying the Qabalah ' by R.J. Stewart instead. Which is far better written and a deeper explanation of a western Qabala.

I'm only starting out with Qabala study, most general books on the Qabala were more towards Christians, Occultists etc. and when I found this book I was excited to see something I was expecting to see a lot more.This was a jump that should of been made decades ago, Paganism and Qabala study, I suspected, would of gone hand in hand when it came to non-fiction, but aparently not.This book, I was not at all impressed, the whole book seemed to be far too superficial, not enough information at all on the Qabala itself.This book seemed to concentrate less on Qabala and more on trying to convince me that Qabala and Paganism, or more specificaly Pagan ideas and images, worked well together.All this book really seemed to do was discuss more superficial ways of making Qabala work with Paganism when to be honest I found it worked a lot better when I found my own way to link the two in my studies.

I find all of this rather confusing. Wicca evolved from Ceremonial Magic and the Qabalah, this is obvious when examining the Altar setup from most Wiccan rites. Nevertheless, The Witches Qabalah is an essential book, even if it's stiall a bit fluffy.