New York, NY:  Gotham Books, 2005.  336 pp $19.95 14 pp Refs.

Wiccan High Priestess Phyllis Curott shares her personal journey to find the ecstasy of true love and sexual union in a bewitching blend of eroticism, science, magic, Jungian psychology and Wiccan wisdom.  Working with the Wiccan spiritual tradition’s embrace of the Masculine and Feminine natures of Divinity as the God and Goddess, Curott seeks guidance from her ’daemon’ – a spiritual being of the opposite (masculine) gender who guides the female seeker on her journey towards her other ‘half.’  However, as Curott learns along the way, this path leads first to the wholeness of her own internal male and female aspects before she can continue on her way to find the true love(r), who literally haunts her dreams and calls through time and space to her heart.

Love is the way light feels.  I nourished the light within myself, and every day was filled with sunlight, every night with the moon; even when the clouds came and the rain fell, it fell to sustain the earth and my soul.  But there were times that I wept for my loneliness and his.  And one night I fell to my knees in a sorrow so great that it felt as if my chest were tearing open – the thought of living the rest of my life without him was unbearable.  I begged, I railed, I demanded, I cried, I prayed, and somehow, perhaps, I opened my heart and I made magic.

Using Wiccan practices of focused intention and the corresponding vibrational energies of physical matter – cornerstones of both magic and quantum physics – Curott’s efforts to bypass the lessons needed to find true love makes the journey more difficult and, unfortunately, more painful.  Love’s demand for openness to and acceptance of the Will of Spirit rather than Self lead her to the realization that the path of true love must start by falling in love with the male and female parts of yourself – your true self – first.  “Be true to yourself and the way will present itself,” advises Nonna, Curott’s friend and mentor.  Supporting her through a painful divorce, Nonna continues to share the life lessons she herself has learned so well.

You have to focus on yourself now, on your journey to wholeness.  It’s time to pull back your masculine energies – they don’t help him [husband] anyway….Keep that energy for yourself – use it to pursue your dream of creative work, find a way to go to film school.  Use the masculine skills that you have developed to protect and fulfill those dreams and that woman.  Use them to rediscover the feminine parts of yourself that you’ve neglected.  The rest will take care of itself.

And so it did, as Curott openly, courageously, and intimately shares the rest of her journey to unification of self and with her other ‘half.’ In the oft used words of the Wiccan tradition, ‘as above, so below,’ it is there in the unconditional love of ourselves as a manifestation of God and Goddess that our own polarities of Divine Feminine and Masculine are healed and our equal opposite in love and sexual ecstasy are drawn to us.  [The way in is the only way out to the road of Sacred Union - the physical, emotional and spiritual embodiment of God and Goddess reunited.

This is a powerful lesson, made more so by the author’s ability to exquisitely express the depth of her emotions and the honesty of her experiences.  Within the deepest moments of wounding, she remains searingly truthful and courageously committed to her quest for true love in body and in spirit, a universal challenge unique in its manifestation for each soul.  Equally commendable is her message that a person cannot truly love or be loved by another in the fullness of love’s capacity until he or she embraces, accepts and eventually comes to unconditionally love the totality of the authentic self in all of its aspects of personality and sexual polarity.  Although written from the viewpoint of personal experience, The Love Spell speaks to the ‘jederman’ of our hearts, and offers hope to all fellow travelers on the path to love - regardless of religious creed or sexual persuasion. 

This is a well-crafted book and a refreshing, uplifting look into the often-misunderstood traditions of contemporary Wicca.

Blessed Be!

Review by Linda Eldridge

Vice President, Sales, Marketing & Product Development

Alternative Medicine Integration Group

ThD Candidate, Emphasis in Integrative Medicine, Holos University Graduate Seminary

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