What Was Your First Pagan Book?

Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language by Mary Daly

Catharine Buck Clarenbach (Nature’s Path) While The Spiral Dance (1989 edition) was my first overtly Pagan book, I was powerfully influenced by the Women’s Spirituality movement — Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, Judy Grahn, Mary Daly, etc. Daly’s Wickedary was a really important book for me when it came out, because it gave a witchy, wickedly humorous voice to ideas long silent. While I no longer buy into the problematic scholarship behind much of those early works, they nonetheless still inform some of the foundation of my magical aesthetic and practice.

The Soothsayer’s Handbook by Elinor Lander Horowitz

Tom Swiss (The Zen Pagan) I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but your question reminded me of how many times as a kid I checked out my local library’s copy of The Soothsayer’s Handbook by Elinor Lander Horwitz. (I never owned a copy, but I just found and ordered a signed one on Amazon, so thanks for the reminder!) That would have been when I was around 12 or 13, I think. Then at 16 or 17 I bought a copy of Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — I remember driving over to the original Greetings and Readings in Towson to get that book and a Rider/Waite deck. It’s interesting to reconsider those roots now, because I’m feeling drawn to get more back into divination.

Now, neither of these is exclusively a “Pagan” book, but I think they set the stage, along with a bunch of fantasy and science fiction novels, New Age-y books, mythology books, and books about Taoism and Zen. I have to give special credit there to Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which I read as a kid and have re-read every few years since and which set my idea of what a wizard should be, and Raymond Smullyan’s The Tao Is Silent, which introduced me to the idea that the mystical sense is as valid as the sense of humor and does not conflict in any way with logic.

My introduction to actual Paganism wasn’t literary, it was a group of friends getting together for an eclectic Circle — I was actually doing that for a while before anyone used the P-word! It was many years later that I bought my first inarguably Pagan book, Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon.