The Centre For Pagan Studies and the Doreen Valiente Foundation are delighted to announce the publication of the revised and expanded edition of Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft by our latest author, Yvonne Aburrow.
Later this year we will also be publishing a new edition of their groundbreaking work The Night Journey: Witchcraft As Transformation.
Both these works are important and innovative books by an established Gardnerian High Priestess and are highly recommended.
About the book
This is a book about how to relate your witchcraft practice to everyday concerns; living comfortably in your body; how to be at peace with yourself so you can help others. It is about the inner work of ritual: what happens on an inner level while the outer forms of ritual (gesture, movement, and speech) are going on. It enables you to develop more effective rituals by thinking about how ritual works. That is why it starts from the beginning, thinking about why we set up sacred space in a specific way, why we celebrate the Pagan festivals, and how that relates to Pagan ethics and theology. Witchcraft is a system of practice with specific goals, and this book inquires into what those goals are and how our practice can help us to achieve them, creating meaning in our lives. The book is aimed at people who want to ground their magical practice in a Pagan worldview and lived values, and practice embodied spirituality.
The inner work is what happens in the mind and body during ritual, and is intimately connected with embodied spirituality, which celebrates being alive and embodied. Only by connecting the inner and the outer can we create positive change in the world.
About the author
Yvonne Aburrow has been practising Paganism since 1985, and was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca in 1991. They started their first coven in 2003, and have trained a dozen people in Wicca, each with their own unique perspectives.
They started thinking about how to make Wiccan ritual more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people in 1995, and about how to make it more inclusive of neurodivergent people in around 2003, when they were working with people with dyslexia. The product of these ideas was their previous book on Wicca, All Acts of Love and Pleasure: inclusive Wicca.
From 2006 to 2008 they studied contemporary religions and spiritualities at Bath Spa University, and carried out research on queer spirituality, syncretism and dual-faith practice, and Pagan attitudes to science. The course also explored feminist spirituality, Paganism and the New Age, and the encounter between East and West.