Rating: 
Summary: What a pile of doggy doo.
Review: This is quite possibly up there in the top 10 of all time rubbish books on Witchcraft. Laurie Cabot claims to be the Official Witch of Salem and an ordained High Priestess descending fro Celtic ancestry. Dave Lee Roth in gothic drag is closer to the truth. My hackles were first raised by the quoting of the fictional work "Mists of Avalon" as a source - I thought maybe Cabot had borrowed some of the poetry from within the book but as I found no evidence of this I can only presume she considers it a valid reference book. Further on the author refers to her style of dress as "traditional witch clothing", by which she means a black cape and a pentacle - and I thought she just wore it to make money out of visiting tourists!. Cabot then goes on to insult those people who follow a pagan path without practicing magic as "whitelighters", a term she uses for those who "only" do spiritual and devotional work. She also states that witches invented "language, writing, metallurgy, law, agriculture and the arts" - arrghh! Cabot perpetuates the Gimbutas myth of a matriarchal society and then says that there is no evidence of this as the patriarchal society coincided with the start of writing. Convenient for her theory but with no basis in any of the evidence. She also confuses matrifocal, matrilineal and matriarchal societies, seeming to think that a matrifocal or matrilineal society automatically means a matriarchal one. Cabot also comments that the original priesthood (I presume she means of the witches?) were all female. Cabot also mentions something that she'd read in a Book of Shadows from the 12th Century!! If she really has access to such a book then surely she should share it with those academics who are researching the history of witchcraft as it would completely change current academic thinking. On to the Burning Times - that dark period of history much beloved by those who seek to portray themselves as a persecuted minority. Cabot gives one of the highest figures I have seen in print - the usual 9 million gets quoted, but Cabot also says the figure may be as high as 13 million. That's more than half the population of Europe at that time. Cabot also can't seem to get away from the witch equals goddess worshipper either, something that gets more and more irritating throughout the book. The facts were out there in the public domain at the time of her writing the book if Cabot had bothered to research outside of pagan books. Despite living in Salem as their resident witch, Cabot then displays great insensitivity to her forebears. She asks whether those killed at Salem were witches, and surmises that perhaps a couple of them may have been, but witches should claim them for their own as they died for our freedom! The dishonour she shows towards the dead by making this claim leaves me speechless. The book is full of pseudo science, crap "research", and disinformation. I sincerely wish the author took her own advice "It takes more than wishful thinking to become a competent practicing witch".
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