Here are 94 books that Initiated fans have personally recommended if you like
Initiated.
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I am an American citizen who taught Classical Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. I have taught Homer (in translation and in Greek), ancient myth, and “reception” of ancient myth. All the books that I discuss below I have taught many times in a first-year seminar about creative “reception” of the Odyssey. Other topics include comparable stories (like The Tempest by Shakespeare) and other great works of reception (like Derek Walcott’s stage version of the Odyssey and his epic poem "Omeros"). Every time I’ve taught the class, I’ve learned the most from free-wheeling discussions with students.
I thought it was great to have Circe herself narrate her love affair with Odysseus.
The first half of the novel interestingly shares her tribulations growing up as a child in a family of gods. I found that this establishes a theme of immortality vs. mortality that the book explores in profound ways. Especially fascinating was Circe’s personal story of her love affair with Odysseus.
I was surprised and delighted that Miller included the resulting child, Telegonus, who is not in Homer but is in ancient myth. Even more surprising to me was Circe falling in love with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son by Penelope (also not in Homer!). This relationship allows the novel to end on a positive note as Circe learns to live like a mortal in her new life with Telemachus.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I worked as a paralegal for many years and know how little justice there is in this world. Passion is a requirement if you toil in that legal arena of wit and woe. Even if you lose your case, you must go on. That’s when I had the epiphany that there are other forms of justice. I also realized that the occult does not necessarily mean bad or evil. If I’m losing faith, I pick up a novel about the delicious and refreshing possibilities of justice with a twist. This is a kind of justice where there is not necessarily a courtroom; there are no judges, no lawyers, and no jury.
Seldom do battered women get true justice. In this book, justice is served on a very cold plate.
Two sisters, Sally and Gillian, are witches by heritage. After their parent’s deaths, they grew up with their two aunts, also witches.
Sally was a happily married woman until her husband suddenly died. Gillian has lived a life of independence or what some might consider a wild life style. When Gillian’s boyfriend becomes a mortal threat, she gives him a potion, accidentally killing him. He comes back to haunt her from the grave. That’s when everyone in their family comes together to banish his evil spirit.
*25th Anniversary Edition*-with an Introduction by the Author!
The Owens sisters confront the challenges of life and love in this bewitching novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic.
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and…
I’m an eclectic witch, and one of my life goals is to empower other witches, especially those who are sensitive to energy. Being a beginner witch isn’t always easy. When I was new, I didn’t have many books — I mostly just relied upon my intuition and awareness of energy. When I finally had the chance to read magical books, I found that many of them had inaccurate information, problematic practices, or questionable spells. However, I also discovered there are just as many wonderful, well-researched books out there. You just have to know which ones are which. I hope this list helps you set a baseline for your future library.
One of my favorite things in the world is inspiration, and this book has loads of it. It contains an insightful retrospective of witchcraft, including how it showed up in popular culture. What I love most about this book is that it sets the stage for new witches and invites them to the party.
From the podcast host of The Witch Wave and practicing witch Pam Grossman-who Vulture has dubbed the "Terry Gross of witches"-comes an exploration of the world's fascination with witches, why they have intrigued us for centuries and why they're more relevant now than ever.
When you think of a witch, what do you picture? Pointy black hat, maybe a broomstick. But witches in various guises have been with us for millennia. In Waking the Witch, Pam Grossman explores the impact of the world's most magical icon. From the idea of the femme fatale in league with the devil to the…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have always been drawn to the archetype of the witch, ever since I was a little girl and one used to visit me at night beside my childhood bed. If Harry Potter had been around when I was a kid, I would have been in heaven, but I had to piece my understandings together over the years, complicated by what society told me about witches being evil and scary. When I read Starhawk in college, my mind was blown. I am always on the lookout for beautifully written books about the powerful healers that are witches. As for that witch beside my bedside, I sometimes wonder if she was a version of myself that didn’t yet exist. If she was in fact me, now.
Witches everywhere are rejoicing the fact that Pamela Coleman Smith is finally being celebrated. If you don’t know (but I’m sure you do,) Coleman Smith illustrated the most iconic tarot deck that exists, which used to be referred to only as the Rider-Waite deck (Waite directed the project and Ryder was the company that published it). Now the decks are being renamed after their creator, a fascinating woman who went by “Pixie” and hung out with Bram Stoker and William Butler Yates. This book is the most beautiful tribute, thick with her illustrations and writings. A deep dive into the life of an important and most magical witch.
Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story brings together the work of four distinguished scholars who have devoted years of research to uncover the life and artistic accomplishments of Pamela Colman Smith. Known to millions as the creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) was also a stage and costume designer, folklorist, poet, author, illustrator of ballads and folktales, suffragette, and publisher of books and broadsheets.
This collaborative work presents: a richly illustrated biography of Pamela's life with essays on the events and people that influenced her including Jack Yeats, Ellen Terry, Alfred Stieglitz, Bram Stoker and William…
We are Witches. Real Witches, doing real magic, casting spells, and weaving webs. We are Amy Torok and Risa Dickens–the co-creators of the Missing Witches project, researching what it means to be a Witch. Together, we have put out almost 300 podcast episodes and published two books and an oracle deck of cards: Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories Of Feminist Magic, New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment, and The Missing Witches Deck of Oracles: Feminist Ancestor Magic for Meditations, Divination and Spellwork. Our first book appeared on VICE Magazine’s list: The Best Books for Starting an Occult Library.
In this book, Christopher Marmalejo entranced us with a singular take on investigating tarot cards through a queer and Indigenous lens. Exploring cartomancy as a mirror to understand lived experience, Christopher brings to light a practice that is unafraid to confront, listen, critique, and unveil.
We love how Christopher’s personality shines through this thoroughly academic yet approachable description of tarot cards and their uses. Reading it filled us with hope for a future of liberation and ideas of how we can make that happen.
Designed to be used with any deck, Red Tarot is a radical praxis and decolonized oracle that moves beyond self-help and divination to reclaim tarot for liberation, self-determination, and collective healing.
For readers of Postcolonial Astrology and Tarot for Change
Red Tarot speaks to anyone othered for their identity or ways of being or thinking—LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC folks in particular—presenting the tarot as a radical epistemology that shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves.
Author Christopher Marmolejo frames literacy as key to liberation, and explores an understanding of tarot as critical literacy. They show how…
We are Witches. Real Witches, doing real magic, casting spells, and weaving webs. We are Amy Torok and Risa Dickens–the co-creators of the Missing Witches project, researching what it means to be a Witch. Together, we have put out almost 300 podcast episodes and published two books and an oracle deck of cards: Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories Of Feminist Magic, New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment, and The Missing Witches Deck of Oracles: Feminist Ancestor Magic for Meditations, Divination and Spellwork. Our first book appeared on VICE Magazine’s list: The Best Books for Starting an Occult Library.
As the title suggests, this is not just a book but a Workbook. With knowledge and curiosity, Maria Minnis’s book is written from a place of great generosity of spirit. Still, it demands that we take action as we confront racism and inspire collective healing.
We can sense her love of the cards and her view of them as a safe place to return to in times of need. As Maria takes us through the archetypes of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, exploring reality and metaphor from an unapologetically Black perspective, she gives us useful and practical exercises to help foster our own growth and understanding.
“An important and profoundly edifying book. . . . Perhaps the most important tarot text that will define this decade.” — Benebell Wen, author of Holistic Tarot
Tarot for the Hard Work is a provocative exploration of the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana that re envisions these archetypes as beacons that illuminate the various ways racism takes root both in ourselves and in the world. Author Maria Minnis, with compassion and wisdom, shows us how these insights can be turned into self-awareness, self-love, and positive social action.
“Tarot for the Hard Workis a tool for passionately demolishing structural oppression.…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
We are Witches. Real Witches, doing real magic, casting spells, and weaving webs. We are Amy Torok and Risa Dickens–the co-creators of the Missing Witches project, researching what it means to be a Witch. Together, we have put out almost 300 podcast episodes and published two books and an oracle deck of cards: Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories Of Feminist Magic, New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment, and The Missing Witches Deck of Oracles: Feminist Ancestor Magic for Meditations, Divination and Spellwork. Our first book appeared on VICE Magazine’s list: The Best Books for Starting an Occult Library.
If anyone ever tries to tell you that studying astrology is brainless, send them a copy of this book. We were amazed and astonished by the research and intellect that Alice infused in this work, tackling Euro-centrist history and forcing it open to reveal a praxis for recontextualizing the stars.
This is astrology beyond horoscopes, beyond personality types. We were electrified to read Alice’s view that astrology is a language we can use to communicate and that history amounts to collective memory. This book blew our minds.
Tapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation.
In a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation.
Too often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars,…
We are Witches. Real Witches, doing real magic, casting spells, and weaving webs. We are Amy Torok and Risa Dickens–the co-creators of the Missing Witches project, researching what it means to be a Witch. Together, we have put out almost 300 podcast episodes and published two books and an oracle deck of cards: Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories Of Feminist Magic, New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment, and The Missing Witches Deck of Oracles: Feminist Ancestor Magic for Meditations, Divination and Spellwork. Our first book appeared on VICE Magazine’s list: The Best Books for Starting an Occult Library.
We believe that words are spells and that writing down our thoughts, feelings, and ideas is a form of doing Magic. So we were thrilled to discover this book, co-edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White, a book that validates and reifies the magic of poetry.
This book opens a portal to discuss the ritual of writing, the radical imagination required for social justice, the alchemy of collaboration, and a slow revolution. We’re enamored with the collaborative nature of the book and how it illustrates that writing and poetry are not just kept for times of solitude but can be ritualized into a community-building praxis to change the world.
Poems, essays, and prompts to sing a new world into being--Queer & BIPOC perspectives on poetry as an insurgent ritual for manifesting liberation and reclaiming power.
Written for poets, spellcasters, and social justice witches, Poetry as Spellcasting reveals the ways poetry and ritual can, together, move us toward justice and transformation. It asks: If ritualized violence upholds white supremacy, what ritualized acts of liberation can be activated to subvert and reclaim power?
In essays from a diverse group of contributing poets, organizers, and ritual artists, Poetry as Spellcasting helps readers explore, play, and deepen their creativity and intuition as integral…
I have been a witch since I was 21 years old—more than four decades ago! It has been my lifelong passion—you might say it’s my calling. I’ve written twelve books, almost all on witchcraft and related subjects. As a writer and a reader, I am often frustrated by the shoddy quality of books on the subject. It thrills me when really good ones come along.
This is an amazing and ambitious book. I had it sitting on my shelf for a while before I read it. One day I wanted to look something up, opened to the middle, and got totally sucked in. It’s so thoughtful, I was completely absorbed. Mankey explores ideas about witchcraft that people just don’t discuss.
Despite shelves out there being full of books on the subject, there are so many things people don’t seem to think about. But Jason Mankey is thinking, and that inspires me. I love his willingness to experiment and to talk about witchcraft in a personal way. It’s almost a diary of his own experiences, while at the same time being useful for any reader. I love this book!
The rites and rituals of Witchcraft are life-changing experiences, but they are also steeped in mystery. Transformative Witchcraft delves into some of the most persistent mysteries of the Craft and provides insightful guidance for raising energy with a Cone of Power; dedications, initiations, and elevations; Drawing Down the Moon; and the Great Rite. Direct experience with the divine and the powerful energies of magick are defining elements of Witchcraft. Filled with powerful personal stories, a fascinating history of modern Wicca and Witchcraft, striking original rituals, and a wealth of tips and techniques, this book provides the beginning or intermediate Witch…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I started studying and practicing Witchcraft in high school. It was an honor to become trained in the Georgian tradition of Wicca by its founding Priestess, Zanoni Silverknife. From there, I branched out to study other branches of Western Paganism as well as metaphysical and mystical systems ranging from Hermeticism, Tarot, and esoteric Qabalah (Kabbalah) to traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Over 20 years and 10 traditionally published books later, I’m as Witchy as ever and am thrilled to share a list of essential books that aided in my early development as a Neopagan Witch. Enjoy!
There’s no doubt about it: this is an incredible “forever book” for Witches of all ages. This compendium has guided every single one of my Witchy years from teenagehood onward, and I still discover something new with every read. Drawing on the Irish authors’ training in Alexandrian Wicca, which developed shortly after Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente developed the Wiccan religion itself, this book journeys across cultures, traditions, and magickal practices, both old and new.
Although the book is a product of the 70s, it was incredibly progressive back then and certainly continues to be. Also, keep in mind that the terms Wicca and Witchcraft, in a Western Pagan context, were synonymous at the time. I find this book’s information (and accompanying photographs throughout) both timeless and perpetually invaluable!
This collection includes two books in one volume, Eight Sabbats for Witches and The Witches' Way and is the most comprehensive and revealing work on the principles, rituals and beliefs of modern witchcraft.
