Overview

When most people hear the word witches, they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, it's a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day witchcraft. Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; and a growing mystery cult whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon.

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"[Mar takes] readers on an expertly crafted spiritual journey.-- ""Publishers Weekly Starred Review"""

Author Information

Alex Mar is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Believer, the Oxford American, the New York Times Book Review, Elle, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. She is the director of the documentary American Mystic. Witches of America is her first book. Amanda Dolan is a professional actor in the MFA program at Brown University. Her credits include Richard III, Macbeth, Falsettos, The Rocky Horror Show, Hair, and The Who's Tommy.

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