Review of Yvonne Aburrow’sDark MirrorYvonne Aburrow’sDark Mirror: The inner w...

Yvonne Aburrow’s Dark Mirror: The inner work of witchcraft is ostensibly focused on Witchcraft, but as someone who is frequently asked to recommend a good introductory book to paganism, to my delight, in this work Aburrow has produced an accomplishment that may be recommended both for witches specifically and, equally, for pagans more generally. In other words, Aburrow’s focus on the inner work of ritual is applicable throughout the full range of pagan identity and the tangibly spiritual. Drawing on the traditions of Feri, Reclaiming, Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, Druidry, Heathen among others, Aburrow most commendably presents the “Pagan world view” in which physical existence matters. Aburrow’s personal view is that witchcraft “is all about the union of spirit with matter, rather than the separation of spirit and matter advocated by some Neo-Platonists, the Gnostics, and religions which were influenced by them.”

In a Part 1, Aburrow addresses ‘Coming to the Circle’, while Part 2 is devoted to ‘Embodied Spirituality’. Unafraid of theology which is often dismissed in pagan circles as irrelevant, Aburrow sees it simply as “any theory to explain the relationship of humans with the numinous.” Our author is also not restrained in offering personal understandings even when they do not conform with prevailing positions and, in considering experimenting with different polarities, argues for a more complex view of energy than merely thinking of it in terms of a simple binary. Rather than being fixed and immutable, difference is to be understood as a spectrum whose components include respect, friendship, the erotic and the romantic. In describing the inner processing of ritual as a set of spiritual and magical techniques and practices, the reader is gently taken along a pathway that includes hermetic principles of vibration, archetypes as unconscious structures that are to be brought into the conscious mind so that the practitioner can work with them, trans-inclusive feminism, the Wiccan circle as a meeting place between the worlds, the levels of invocation in Wicca, the ethics of magic, ‘kink and consent’, ritual nudity, the varieties of freedom, valuing the night, and the earthy and liminal style of magic as well as the pressures of consumerism-commercialism-capitalism and the need/goal of restoring harmony to the full gamut of the world, the spirit world, the land, the wider community, friends, all beings, nature and the seasons. Each section of the book is followed by an illuminating set of reflective questions for Discussion and suggestions for Exercises.

Aburrow unabashedly recognises that Wicca is not only duotheist but can also be animist, pantheist, polytheist, monist and/or atheist. Ritual is explained as a poetic creation of meaning and connection formulated from metaphor, imagery and myth that welcomes not only LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent people but all aspects of gender, sexuality, body and mind. Aburrow concludes that ultimately “the inner world of witchcraft consists of making connections with the other, the strange, the preternatural, and the world of the unconscious” in order to “appreciate the glorious complexity of Nature, and the benefits of diversity.” Aburrow’s Dark Mirror is a unique achievement in being not only comprehensively encyclopaedic in its thoroughness but also easily accessible in its deeply considerate, straightforwardly clear and personal presentation.