Would anyone recommend or have comments on Scott Cunninghams 2 books Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner and A Further Guide for the Solitary Practitioner? I'm thinking of buying both of these.
In terms of Wicca, yes. He provides some generally decent insights. I do not practice Wicca, or much of any religion and I'm not super nature oriented for that matter either. Cunningham is.
His books are very good. As a solitary those two books are very good to learn from and his dose a nice job explaining wicca for newbies. I am mostly nature based magick, so that's why I like his books so much. I recommend them for sure.
I think Cunningham's books are a great place to start. While he had no formal coven from any tradition, now post-mortem Raven Gramassi's family tradition is rumored to have been under a year of training for Scott. There seems to be many basic elements of a generic form of Wicca in Cunningham's book, never citing God Names.
I have to say if Scott Cunningham had written a book about CHEMISTRY, I might have passed it in college! He is brilliant in his simplicity. Recently while editing 'the Goddess Book' I found these paragraphs I had written about Mr. Cunningham:
"Only recently, did I re-open my old copy of Scott Cunningham’s “Living Wicca” which was a follow up to his once controversial “Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner.” Immediately after the index was a section entitled A Note to ‘Traditional’ Wiccans. These few paragraphs explained that this book was a further guide for Solitary practitioners of Wicca. Without hesitation, he stated that his initial book was NOT an attack on conventional Wicca, covens, or their usual training methods. He was emphatic about his books being written for individuals who lived in areas where no covens were available to seekers of the Wiccan traditions, or those who wish to remain discreet about their practices for any number of reasons, or perhaps were simple more of a private individual who wished to work with the Lord and Lady in privacy.
I felt better after reading about Scott Cunningham’s own negative reception from Wiccans of “real traditons,” back in the day when coven-taught practitioners scoffed at the concept of a solitary self-taught Wiccan. 30 years later, Cunningham’s once controversial book is one that almost every Wiccan now owns and cherishes. I definitely identified with Scott after writing “Christian Wicca: the Trinitarian Tradition!”
