79 Books Like Queen of All Witcheries

I pull this book off my shelf all the time. It is so beloved that I might need a new copy; some of those pages look old. This is the oldest book I recommend and the only reference book, but if you’re practicing witchcraft, you need reference books.

I find that the internet can be very helpful for research, but also weirdly unreliable. You just don’t know what you’re getting. But I know I can trust Scott Cunningham, I know he researched every word in his books and that the information is grounded in that research. So when I’m doing a spell and I need an herbal concoction, or I just want inspiration, this book is my go-to.

Thorn Mooney blows me away because she’s both an academic, studying witchcraft, and a practitioner. She’s also totally accessible. I never feel, reading Thorn, that she’s talking over me; she’s the opposite of stuffy.

Thorn Mooney is one of the best representatives of the new generation of witches, and she knows her stuff!

I don’t think I knew, at least consciously, that magic and witchcraft needed to be revisited from a woman’s perspective until I read this book. It was so influential on my thinking! Williams takes on unspoken assumptions that underlie many of the theology, ritual, and ideas in magic and witchcraft, and she reconsiders ritual in that light.

I love that she is scholarly but explains everything simply and straightforwardly. I love that she cares about the impact of magic and witchcraft on us as human beings. 

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!

This is a left-of-field choice, but when thinking about female fliers it is worth remembering the cultural baggage they inevitably carry with them. Historically, female flight whether by broom, wing, mental transcendence or in the cockpit of a Spitfire, has threatened the patriarchy while liberating women. Even today, ‘flighty’ women are still considered in negative terms. This book explores the power and prejudice around aerial females.

With The Goddess Path the late Patricia Monaghan, author of The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, bequeathed a well-designed and deeply wise pathway into spiritual engagement. She begins in “Basics of Goddess Spirituality” by answering commonly heard questions, then presents “Frameworks for Goddess Imagery” and “The Goddess Year” of rituals. The rest of the book is “The Goddess Revealed”: a chapter on each of twenty Goddesses, presenting her historical or traditional invocation, her myth and meaning, her symbols, and her feasts. At that point, Patricia Monaghan presents suggestions for invoking each Goddess through the reader’s personal ritual. Here she wisely speaks of the dynamics of women’s lives in modern culture and the power of this spiritual practice, flowing from extremely ancient roots into the presence of 21st-century women.

There are hundreds of good books on Goddess spirituality. This one presents a heart-centered approach that blends beautiful color plates of historical Goddess art and artifacts from around the world with an accessible explication of each Goddess’s mythology and cultural significance—as well as Hallie Iglehart Austen’s invitation to join her in a brief guided mediation for each Goddess. Her stated goal is that readers might “come into balance, reclaiming the lost feminine deep within ourselves and sharing that wisdom and power with the world.” Here’s the opening to a preface entitled “A Millennial’s Initiation”: “Every book is a teacher, yet some books reveal truths that flow into your deepest roots and stay with you forever. Reading The Heart of the Goddess was, truly, a rite of passage for me.” 

If you try to learn about the cultural history of the sacred female cross-culturally, you are likely to encounter the attitude in our patriarchal society that Goddesses couldn’t really have been widespread or ever been very important. A handy refutation can be found in this book, which contains information on over 11,000 Goddesses, nymphs, spirits, and deified women around the world. Grouped according to geographic regions, each entry gives you not only the translation of the Goddess’s name but also her story. That is, it’s a biographical dictionary because it gives the characteristics and the mythology associated with each Goddess. If you read through the entries for any one region, you will become immersed in a deeply poetic sense of the resonant cultural history underlying later developments.

Marija Gimbutas’ The Living Goddesses is a great place to start your study of goddesses.

Gimbutas is a major researcher in the field of goddess studies, and her book is quoted more than often. Instead of reading other scholars’ work that quotes Gimbutas, why not read the original study of Paleolithic and Neolithice archetypes and their descendents in several Bronze and Iron Age cultures.

Additionally, Gimbutas postulates how those archetypes have evolved in contemporary culture. Matrilineal social structure as mirrored in religion and myth is the basis of Gimbutas’ gift to women today.

Dr. Davidson has written extensively about Norse mythology, both books and articles. Her scholarship is terrific, and I have three of her books in my research library. What makes this book so unique, though, is that she concentrates on the goddesses of the Norse pantheon and women’s roles in the Viking world in general, of which not much is written. Reading this book is like taking a master class in Norse women’s studies, and I had to replace my print copy because I’d scribbled so many notes in it that it became impossible to read.