Curses, Hexes & Crossing: A Magician's Guide to Execration Magick [Paperback]

After reading this, any doubt I had about being able to perform curses left me.

She also persuaded me not to look for this as a panacea. Not that I was a mind to anyway; I much rather look forward to the Thrice Returned rule of blessing others and staying connected in my social web, over performing ritual in a frenzied, über-righteous mental state (to invoke a cosmic "temporary-insanity" plea) to do cursing.

She spoke first with candor about her past, her experiences, ethics, and do-ability of this branch of craft.

After this decent (and highly readable/ engaging) intro of chapters, she laid out the curses. She described curses with energy-backers Hecate, Svengali, and even God of theBible (using the Psalms).

For this book's premise, promise, content, practice-ablility, and delivery, I give it 5-stars.

Pros:
~The author used a casual, conversational tone that I enjoyed. I laughed during the first few pages and I had good expectations

~Nice, convenient size for anyone who wants to carry it around

~Section on curses provides a decent quantity of spells from different traditions/cultures

Cons:
~Redundant: On page 7 she says, "banishing, exorcism, and dispelling negativity are all, also, technically forms of execration as a dear friend pointed out." On page 16, a mere 9 pages later, she says "Yes-- even banishing and exorcisms are technically a form of execration magick"

~Little-to-no elaboration on theories to really get a feel of what the author is discussing: Yes we are all free to build our own theories, but sometimes it's nice to get another witch's viewpoint. She just drops an opinion but doesn't really elaborate or provide much detail.

~A little too "convenient" of a size: the book is a total of 142 pages...already a pretty paltry offering. 100 of those pages are curses, 42 of those pages are the preceding text. As a witch who's been practicing for over 10 years this didn't faze me much because I have already read many texts and other witches' works and have already got a nice understanding of many aspects of many magical traditions. However, in comparison to other books, like Jason Miller's Protection and Reversal Magick, which to this day is one of my favorite witchcraft books, this book is extremely bare bones. Her chapters on history of cursing and different cultural examples of cursing are practically nonexistent and lack citations and interesting specific material that the reader might want to review further in other texts. She just mentions WAY too many things in passing.

~Vague: She says things like, "To bind the tongues of those who would bear false witness against you, you would mix magical herbs and pour them over a cow's tongue" Okay, well which herbs...there's a lot of herbs on this Earth, are there any particularly notable for this purpose. Again, as a witch who's practiced for awhile, I've reached the part of my path where I know intent and energy are the most important parts of the magical ritual but I also know that in many magical traditions there is shared knowledge where practitioners will share recipes and things they've found successful. Also, I know that some ingredients have certain "vibrations" (for lack of a better term) that provide the element a witch is looking for in a spell. For each witch, that energetic wavelength that ingredient emits to the witch will be different for each witch but still, if you're going to provide recipes or talk about something specific, be specific about which ingredients you have read are useful or common.

My overarching review of this is that there just isn't enough material, enough history, enough insight, enough reference to traditions and cultures to call this a "guide to execration magick [sic]".

Very informative and well written. This book covers everything you need to start with studying hexes, curses, and reversing less than pleasant things people might send your way.