All of my non-fiction writing so far has dealt in one way or another with spirituality, religion, or mythology. Even when I was focusing on fiction, I wrote the occasional article.
The largest collection of these is one I’ve been writing since 1993. Anne Niven, who had been one of my trainees in the clergy training program of the Fellowship of the Spiral Path, asked me to write a regular feature on goddesses, “One of Ten Thousand”, for Sagewoman Magazine, which I am still continuing.
Before I started writing novels, I made my living writing educational and training materials for Far West Laboratory for Educational R&D in San Francisco, so it is probably not surprising that after leading circles and teaching about spiritual work for twenty years, I decided it was time to start harvesting what I had learned and share it in book form.
Celestial Wisdom for Every Year of your Life (Conari Books, 2003) was a collaboration with Z Budapest, whose books, starting with Grandmother Moon, I had been editing. She supplied the astrology, and I came up with most of the rituals. We tried to use a light touch to convey some deeper meanings, and included some great ideas for birthday parties. Celestial Wisdom won the Coalition of Visionary Resources 2004 Visionary Award in the New Age Book category.
The first book to present my own work was Taking Up the Runes (Weiser Books, 2005) based on the material I created for my first rune class in 1988, and refined and expanded in subsequent rounds of the class over the next seventeen years. For this book I developed a multi-disciplinary approach that uses rune-lore, ancient and modern, ritual, and real-world experience to help the student to internalize the meaning of the runes. It is set up for use by solo students or classes, and I’m pleased to report that it has become something of a classic, used as a text by rune-study groups and students year after year. Available as an ebook.
Essential Ásatrú: Walking the Path of Northern Paganism (Citadel Press, 2006) was written for what was intended to be a series of books edited by Isaac Bonewits to explain different varieties of paganism. I believe that his book on Wicca and mine on Asatru were the only ones completed, but Essential Asatru has proved to be very successful as an introduction for those who are becoming interested in heathen religion, or are looking for a book that will explain what they are doing to relatives and friends. If Taking Up the Runes presents what I learned about the heathen lore of the past, Essential Ásatrú presents what I have learned about the contemporary heathen community.
Trance-Portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World (Weiser, 2008) was written because people kept asking for training in trance work, and I could not find any materials that presented a systematic program for learning it in a single volume. My goal was to teach people how to use self-created cues and conditioning to achieve specific states of consciousness from meditation to journeying. These skills provide the basis for more advanced work. I use the lessons for my regular trance classes, and the book has been used as a text by many other groups as well as solo students. Although many of the examples come from the Norse, Celtic and Greek traditions, being the ones I know best, the skills can be used for work in almost any tradition. Available as an ebook.
The Way of the Oracle: Recovering the Practices of the Past to find Answers for Today (Weiser, 2012) presents the results of over twenty years of study and practice with my own oracular group. In this book, I survey the training, rituals and skills of oracles in the ancient world, in particular those of Classical Greece, the Celts, and the seidh workers of the Viking Age, followed by an analysis of today’s emerging oracular tradition and a consideration of the meaning of prophecy. Available as an ebook.
Upcoming Projects:
Possible future non-fiction works include a book on Deity Possession, also known as Aspecting, a collection of my Goddess articles from Sagewoman Magazine, and a book about the Norse god Odin.