The Book of Hedge Druidry

by Joanna Van Der Hoeven

[HekArtemis]

This is a perfectly suitable book for beginners of any Pagan practice, but it's pretty boring for anyone who isn't a beginner. I am not a beginner. I am giving it four stars because I can recognise it as being a good book even though I was pretty bored throughout.

I listened to this on audio and I do not really recommend it in audio. The narrator is a good narrator, however she is obviously not Pagan at all. This book has made me realise that Pagan books should be narrated by Pagans, or at the very least people who have thoroughly researched pronunciation. There is only so many times an experienced Pagan can listen to the word "sam-hain" before they want to tear their hair out and gouge out their eyeballs. The weird part is that her pronunciation was fine for a whole bunch of oddly pronounced Celtic words, but Samhain was wrong every time. And okay I could be fine with it if it were only a few times, but I am going to estimate she said it about 50 times - there is a section on the festivals, so it is indeed mentioned a huge number of times. It was kind of stressful, and unfortunately any beginner listening to it is going to learn the wrong pronunciation.

Furthermore, audio is not the best medium for a book that has a few bullet point areas. Listening to someone list a bunch of herbs and plants and their properties, or the Ogham and all it's pieces, is not that fun, it's difficult information to retain - the written word is better for such a thing so you can easily go back to reference it later when needed. This is possibly going to be a problem for a majority of Pagan books though.

The author occasionally made mistakes regarding certain things, like the phases of the moon - no the New Moon is not "technically" a tiny sliver of moon, it's literal 0% of reflected light according to astronomy. She also oddly missed a few things, like she would describe a ritual in which you would turn counter clockwise, but then doesn't explain why counter clockwise is the direction you would turn (nor that in the southern hemisphere you would perhaps want to turn the other way instead). I did however appreciate that she discussed how different the cardinal points are for each individual and how dependent it is on region, that is often a point Pagan writers ignore.

Overall, as I stated at the beginning, this is a perfectly suitable book for beginners. It's got a few issues, but that is probably true of all beginner Pagan books sadly. It's solid for what it is. The audio book is not something I recommend for the explained reasons. I personally was wanting a not beginner book, something that delves a bit more deeply into hedge craft and not general Pagan practices, beliefs and ideas. Oh well.