Alex Mar got two kinds of reviews when she published her book, Witches of America, last month. In the mainstream press, she was said to have produced a thoughtful, deeply researched, compassionate book about a subject most people know very little about, one which these reviewers often implied deserved a certain amount of scepticism and ridicule: modern pagan witches.
In the New York Times Book Review, for example, the novelist Merritt Tierce praised it thus: “It is a unique and vital quality of Mar’s approach that in her taking her subjects so seriously, we take her seriously in turn.” A recent talk she gave at New York’s Housing Works Bookstore was stuffed to the rafters with those curious to learn about how witchcraft is practiced in modern America.
But elsewhere, and particularly in those online spaces where self-identified pagans gather, a different critical consensus was emerging. “I was at some of the same events as Alex, and I’m appalled at how she described the participants and their beliefs,” read Mar’s first Amazon review. “I think she lost all the credibility she built with her fantastic documentary with this florid book.” Another who went only by the name “Libelous Slander” chimed in: “Smug. Dismissive. Disrespectful. Condescending. Exploitative.” A Goodreads review sniffed: “This book could easily be renamed ‘Eat, Pray, Learn Magic’.” Such reviews now dominate those forums.
Every writer today has a horror story about online reviews to share. The internet age can leave authors feeling as though they’ve subjected years of hard work to the judgment of those who used to have to leave their thoughts on bathroom walls.
But even in that context, Mar’s bad online reviews are uniquely forceful. They are personal and bear the hallmarks of obsession. And many of them, claiming a kind of insider knowledge, claim that Mar had misrepresented, exploited and misled her subjects.
I met Mar in a New York cafe recently to discuss this. Though she was quite prepared to defend her book, she also seemed a little shaken by the controversy. When I asked her if she’d expected the level of online vitriol she’d received, her shoulders sank a little: “Not really.”
“I think as an intelligent human being you can’t be writing about a religious community and not anticipate that there will be some level of controversy or tension,” Mar said. “I did not expect it to be so fast.”
Mar had spent years learning all she could about pagans before writing her book. At first she’d been looking at them in the role of a journalist of fringe religions, curious about these tenacious faiths that were mostly ignored by mainstream American culture.
In 2010, Mar had made a documentary about them, called American Mystic. Though it was hardly a blockbuster, the project was well-received. Pagans are often heard and not seen, you could say, popping up as punchlines or fetish objects in popular culture – think of The Craft or Willow’s Wiccan storyline on Buffy the Vampire Slayer – but rarely receiving “serious” treatment as a proper faith. Mar’s respectful treatment of one pagan tradition, the Feri, in the film won her a certain amount of respect in the wider pagan community.
But a few months after the documentary came out, Mar said, “I honestly woke up one morning and I just had this feeling, like a missed opportunity”.
Filming the rituals had only lightly scratched the itch she felt about their practice. It certainly hadn’t allowed her to make any kind of personal exploration of the faith, which she now found she kind of wanted to do, and document. She returned to one of the priestesses of the Feri to whom she’d become somewhat close, a witch named Morpheus Ravenna, and set to work.
All along, Mar said, her aim was to provide a compassionate account of pagan beliefs. When she said she was thinking about perhaps adopting some of their beliefs, she was sincere. “I envy them, the believers,” she admits in the introduction.
So she took readers along with her as she returned to Ravenna and other Feri practitioners, then carried on through another tradition called the Coru Cathubodua, and even to the side of a man who claims to be a necromancer. Rituals – clothed and unclothed – are described in detail. Doubts are expressed. Mar presents herself, throughout, as a “wary New Yorker”, occasionally bewildered.
The book concludes with Mar still sceptical of the beliefs she’s followed. But its tone isn’t precisely critical, either. The book insists there’s no need to come to definitive answers on any faith. “When you have that feeling, of an encounter with something greater than yourself – however subtle, whatever form it takes – trust it” is the ambivalent place Mar arrives in her final paragraph.
Yet it is precisely this equivocal approach that earned her all those angry social media comments and reviews that characterized her as a “spiritual tourist”. Reviews on Patheos, the religious blogging hub, characterised her book as “exploitation”. Facebook threads filled with complaints.
And more than a few took their rhetoric to extremes. The man who’d made the “Eat, Pray, Learn Magic” joke, for example, hadn’t only posted on Goodreads. He’d also written a bad Amazon review. And then, on one of the blogs he operates, he’d elaborated on his disdain to the tune of over 3,200 words.
One voice of dissent did crop up, immediately. A Washington DC-area pagan practitioner named David Salisbury wrote a review he called An Alternative Look at Witches of America. In it, he said he had been mentioned in the book himself, but hadn’t found his representation particularly false or misleading. But he seemed to know he was writing against a tide. “Considering that the extreme, vast majority of reviews from within our community are negative (I don’t think I’ve read a single positive one yet),” Salisbury wrote, “I thought I’d present my own critiques, but also my critiques of the critiques. This is in addition to (gasp) what I liked about it.”
It’s not unusual for subjects of nonfiction to feel a writer has misrepresented them in some way; in fact, it’s a common hazard of journalistic work. Yet, curiously, Salisbury is among a precious few of the subjects in the book to have commented on it directly. While nearly every bit of pagan criticism of Mar’s book claimed that her subjects disputed the book, hardly any have done so publicly.
In fact, I could find only one direct disavowal by one of Mar’s subjects lingering on the web. On that long review, one commenter identifies herself as the character Mar calls Karina in the book, a teacher in the Feri tradition, approving the review’s hectoring tone. “As a living, breathing, feeling, embodied Human-Wild-Divine-Witch, betrayed and reduced to a one dimensional ‘character’ within Mar’s book, I thank you for humanizing me and calling out the author for who and what she is.”
(When I tried to reach Morpheus Ravenna and others for purposes of this article, my emails went unreturned.)
For her part, Mar said she had had sent many of the book’s subjects their own copies before publication. Speaking of the general reaction, she said: “It’s been mixed. Many people have not told me explicitly how they feel about it. Some people have been positive. I have a sense through other people, third parties, that certain people are uncomfortable or unhappy. It’s a whole mix.”
So she agrees that the controversy is real. “My sense is that one of the larger issues has been that the book was written by someone who is not, has not been a pagan insider for decades, a devout individual,” she said. “There are a lot of people in the community who really like the idea of being understood by the mainstream culture [but] then feel very conflicted when they see an example of how that could be done.
“I think that’s totally fair,” she continued. But Mar wanted to write a literary treatment of the subject, not a proselytizing book.
“People write about religion in this way that’s kind of deadening and flat,” Mar said. “To me, it doesn’t speak to the generation that I feel like I’m part of right now. I thought this was a way – using myself, and being honest that way and being messy and in this gray zone – was a way of making it alive.”
That seems about right. Doubt, faith and religion are indeed messy issues. The paradox is that acknowledging that grey zone is precisely what left Mar open to the criticism that’s now dominating her Amazon and Goodreads reviews.
“Right now, maybe a little more time needs to go by,” Mar said. “I know that there are people who think that it’s a really compelling conversation starter or dialogue starter.” But until someone chimes in to do that, her book will be stuck with its peculiar dual personality of an online reputation.
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