Book 5

The Way of Four
by Deborah Lipp

In keeping with the popular trend I've taken with my reading thus far, this is another one of those books I've been meaning to read for a while. It's another one that I've heard great things about, but beyond that, I've never really picked up a book about the elements before, and the last time I bought a  pagan book for fun I almost bought this one (not that this process isn't fun - but before I had committed to reading the books for IDGAF). 


This time I'm switching things up a little and reading an e-book instead of a hard copy. That means I may not have the right corresponding page numbers and such as I go through, but hopefully they won't be too far off. I've only ever read one other e-book before, and it was actually a trilogy, so that when one book ended the next one just started and it was one huge document. I'm going to miss the feel of an actual book, but I figured if I wanted to take this to work it's a bit more discrete (not that it matters much anyway).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Update July 13
I figured I'd come on here and give you guys a progress report so far since it says I'm about 65% done the book (so says the progress bar). 

I have to say this book is like night and day compared to Natural Witchery in terms of the writing style and how the book reads. I like this one a lot better so far...not that I didn't like Natural Witchery, I just found it to be a bit juvenile in the approach. She had lots of great ideas though, and I found it helpful in a lot of ways, but I'm not talking about that book right now...

I really like Lipp's approach a lot, and I find myself agreeing with a lot of the things she's been saying so far, like "the process of self-actualization is vital to a spiritual life" and "the elements are the beginning of things", and she's said a few things that really resonate with me but that I'd never really considered before, like "the elements provide us with a system of interrelations, and magic is all about interrelations". 

I also thought the "3 worlds + 1" idea was really neat. She essentially says that earth, air and water are all interconnected in that "a bird can land on a tree branch or dive in to the sea to catch a fish. No creatures live in fire." All the elements are interrelated, maybe not always so obviously, but she is very right in the above statement. 

She has a lot of charts and quizzes in this book, most of which are there to help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses so you can find out which areas you need to be focusing on to help bring yourself into balance. She's also got some helpful exercises to do for each element, again, to help you get more balanced and to help you realize what it's like to work with a certain element. She does sort of warn not to delve too deeply in any one element though, or else you can start seeing negative results, so she recommends that if you're working with a specific element, you shouldn't work with it for more than one month at any one time. I think that's really smart. 

She also referred to the elements as guardians at one point, which is something I've never heard them referred to as outside of the movie The Craft

The last bit of stuff I was reading was all about the elements in your home and how you can make your home more balanced. I thought this was a very interesting concept, as I've never really thought about it that way before. Again, she's got lots of charts and quizzes to help you along, and some helpful suggestions as to how to work with whatever element your lacking in. 

This section also includes stuff on clothing and beauty treatments, which seems a bit superficial to me, but it's kind of neat to know how to work with them on that level if that's what appeals to you. 

So yeah, so far so good. Hopefully I'll be back next week with another update! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Update July 20
I finished this book on Wednesday night, and I have to say, it's probably my favourite book of the 5 I've read so far. As much as I enjoyed the Pema Chodron book I initially started with, I think that this is one that I'll get a lot more continual use out of, in that the exercises and suggestions she has will be something I try and incorporate into my practice at some point.  

These last section was mainly focused on how to work with the elements in a ritual setting. There were lots of great suggestions as to how to represent them on an altar and how to work with them in rituals. She also had a section on concreting objects and people, which I thought was also handy. She went in to detail on how to use the elements individually in specific ways for spells, which I thought was also great because a lot of times they get overlooked when people are going over their correspondences for spells. 

After this last section, there is an appendix in the back. I found this to be quite useful, and I think that it definitely adds to the overall handiness of this book.

All in all, I thought this was a well presented book. I enjoyed her writing style, and I felt the book was well paced overall. There is a lot of really useful information in it, and even though there's lots of quizzes and charts, they all seem to be helpful. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, especially someone that wants to get back to basics. 

No comments:

Post a Comment