Weave the Liminal: Living Modern Traditional Witchcraft

Provocatively subtitled "Living Modern Traditional Witchcraft", Weave the Liminal is a contradictory yet ultimately inspirational new book from Laura Tempest Zakroff.

The best part is chapter 3, in which Zaroff lays out her RITES -- Roots, Inspiration, Time, Environment, and Star -- a truly useful guide to discovering your inner witch, and defining exactly what you want in and from your Craft.

  • Roots counsels researching family ancestry to help find paths that may call to you.
  • Inspiration explores what aspects of witchcraft speak to you personally (and why).
  • Time addresses the myriad tensions that arise when balancing a mundane and magickal life. (I especially appreciated the adice to explore creating our own feast days.)
  • Environment discusses all things about where you physically live and how your environment will affect not only the ability to find locations for rituals, but how the local flora and fauna can affect your magick.
  • Star addresses creating your own code of ethics based on what you want to accomplish.

The chapter includes discussions about working solo or with/in a group as well as finding a teacher and the pressure beginners often feel to follow the 'right' way, as laid out by others.

There is a lot of information here, and this is not an 'easy read' by any means. For a long-time witch like myself, Weave the Liminal is a bit jumbled, with advanced concepts sitting side by side to really basic bits of info ("Magick is Not a Band-Aid," "The Crux of Cursing", and "Weave Your Pattern Well" next to "Do I Need a Book of Shadows").

Overall, I think this is one of the best books on Witchcraft I've ever read. Go get a copy.

~review by Lisa Mc Sherry

Author: Laura Tempest Zakroff
Llewellyn Worldwide, 2019
pp. 240, $19.99

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