Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I apologize for not blogging lately. I've felt rather burnt out on everything in my life, and have spent the time catching up on some TV shows I have been meaning to watch, relaxing, and working a bit to prepare for the upcoming school year. With just over a week before I have to return, I guess it's time to return to some 'normalcy' in my life and that means working on the blog and, of course, reviewing some new books!
I just finished The Four Elements of the Wise: Working with the Magickal Powers of Earth, Air, Water, Fire by Ivo Dominguez Jr, which I highly recommend, especially to those who worked through my Elemental Magic series last year and are looking for more. Dominguez dives deep into the four elements, and, like my series, offers several exercises to develop a deeper relationship and understanding of the elements in occult practices. These exercises are not explicitly laid out in a separate section with questions to reflect upon, but instead built into the text itself. I enjoyed this as it made it to where you didn't know it was coming and couldn't just gloss over the exercise. If you are anything like me, I read a lot and don't always want to do the exercises outlined so I'll skip over them, sometimes not even reading through them completely. You can't do that in this book, which I liked. It forced my ADD mind into reading through them because I wasn't sure where the informational text would pick back up. It also forced me to think about what was requested of me, and caused me to pause on more than one occasion. While Dominguez is Wiccan, it is not a predominant theme in his book, which I was thankful for. He takes a worldly approach to the elements, offering folklore, myth, and esoteric practices from a wide range of cultures and occult groups without saying one is right and others wrong, making the material accessible to all practitioners.
The first half of the book builds the historical foundation of working with the elements including fundamental lore, elemental spirits, basic uses and applications, platonic solids, how the elements align with different threefold practices, and elements within the elements. This exploration was fascinating and I walked away having learned something new in every chapter. I found the chapter on elements within the elements most fascinating and one of the most difficult to understand. No element, at least within our plane of existence, exists in a pure form. Sometimes a Fire is airy, other times earthy. These qualities lend slightly different energies to a spell or ritual and should be accounted for. I also loved Dominguez's inclusion of hedge riding and the three realms of the world tree. It isn't often I come upon this inclusion in books. It's nice to be recognized and how the elements connect to this practice. The last half of the book discusses each element in detail, including the element of spirit, and ends with practical applications anyone can benefit from. I appreciated that Dominguez dedicated an entire chapter to working with the elements in a healing ritual. The directions for this ritual are thorough and incorporate the practices learned through the book.
This book is definitely not for beginners, but instead for those who already have a working understanding and relationship with the elements. I encourage you to work through my Elemental Magic series first, then tackle The Four Elements of the Wise to continue building your knowledge and understanding. The elements are a crucial part of spell work and understanding magic, but we rarely find them discussed in any great detail as done in Dominguez's book. The Four Elements of the Wise: Working with the Magickal Powers of Earth, Air, Water, Fire by Ivo Dominguez Jr is available now and I couldn't recommend it more!
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It's excellent that you've been taking some massively needed R&R time. I don't know about you, but I am often atrociously bad at doing so by choice. Instead, it is often my health or other circumstances beyond my full control that dictate (or demand, as the case may be) that stop and allow myself the right to rest for a while.
ReplyDeleteI really hope that the coming school year goes safely and positively for you. I can just imagine how challenging it must be to work in academedia during the pandemic.
Thank you for this terrific book review. I swear, it's almost uncanny how you often review books that I've either recently or long been eyeing, this title amongst them (I am sooo an "element witch", if you will). Perhaps we're on the same literary wavelength. 😃
Autumn Zenith 🧡 Witchcrafted Life