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A short volume in a long series, this book contains three high-quality essays on present-day pagan and magical groups, dismissing many of the more pervasive modern legends about them – both those of fundamentalists, and those of romantic pagans. As well as being both entertaining and scholarly, it's also an invaluable guide for any game dealing with modern 'witchcraft' or the occult. In particular, it makes a far better reference book for the Verbena than the awful official splatbook.

Ronald Hutton's essay on "Modern Pagan Witchcraft" is definitely the best. At this point I should mention how utterly fantastic all of Hutton's books are, and urge you all to rush out and spend your cash not on the latest sourcebook, but on Hutton's wonderful histories of early British religion, festivals, the British Civil War, and so forth. I should also mention that his brief analysis of pagan motifs in English literature is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the best I've ever read, and I wish he'd spent longer on it.

Hutton gently deflates the more ridiculous pagan fantasies (many of which – such as the idea that witchcraft was a genuine medieval religion, are a common part of many games), and demonstrates quite clearly that there is no evidence that Wicca arose out of any kind of authentic pagan survival, but is instead a new and vital religion. He writes with great admiration and affection of many pagan groups, and includes a lovely personal account of his attendance at a Wiccan wedding, calling it "in its way as magnificent a manifestation of religion as a sung mass in a Gothic cathedral, the call to prayer in a blue-sided mosque, or the conclusion to a seven-fold puja in a Buddhist temple."

It's also a splendid source of inspiration for occult games. He begins with entertaining detail on Freemasons, the Golden Dawn, and other secret societies such as "the Toadmen (who claimed to derive their powers from a magical toad's bone, gained through a complex ritual)," all of which can be happily ransacked for conspiratorial games. He then details briefly some fascinating surviving folk-beliefs about witchcraft, such as an intriguing paragraph about the need in some areas for the witch to pass on her power before she dies, which suggested an interesting possibility for Avatars in 'Unknown Armies' games. The whole essay is crammed with wonderful titbits like these; I now know, for example, that the term "Book of Shadows" originally had nothing to do with grimoires, but was taken by Gardner (the founder of Wicca) from "an article on a Sanskrit manual concerning the art of divination by a person's shadow". The information on the British occult scene for the last forty years is great UA 'Occult Underground' material, too.

It could also provide a really interesting variety of modern witch for games such as 'Mage' or 'Witchcraft', one who is consciously aware of creating a new magickal tradition rather than imitating an old one. The idea of the Verbena really being founded in the 1940's out of neo-Hermetic groups also amuses me, and could make for some amusing scenarios ("So, where were you at the founding of the Traditions?" "Uh … we were being persecuted by the evil Inquisition!")

The second essay is on "Satanism and Satanic Mythology" and is written by Jean La Fontaine. While not as amusing and interesting as Hutton's, it does have some very good information on modern Satanists, which is well worth using. In particular, 'Vampire' players might be interested in the details of the real-life "Temple of Set". A long part of the essay deals with modern myths about so-called 'satanic abuse'. Some GMs might want to use the lurid fantasies of the Christian right as a real force of evil in their games (as in the execrable "Rage Across New York"); I myself would be cautious about indulging such dangerous and nasty legends. Gaming also tends to occasionally get caught in the flack from such attacks by fundamentalists, and an ability to refute their delusions with factual information can be useful to all of us.

The last essay, by Willem de Blecourt (a fantastic name, which I will steal for an NPC), is on "The Continued Existence of Traditional Witchcraft." It's less well-crafted than the other two, and gets rather lost at points, seeming to not really be terribly certain what it's about. It does have many good snippets on witchcraft superstitions – such as that in Naples in 1921, an old woman was found to have a parcel containing "a lamb's head wrapped round with a woman's hair, which was attached to the former by a kind of steel comb and forty-three nails driven into the head.' Isn't that a great detail to throw into a game? Another example; "to bind a man, you need nine nuts, his belt, a wooden thread as long as his waist, a key and a bolt. His sperm should be put into the nuts and everything should be tied into a white hankerchief and be hidden somewhere, while a binding charm is recited." A UA Pornomancy spell, I think. The stuff on the links between the far-right and certain pagan groups is also interesting – Get of Fenris in Werewolf, perhaps?

Overall, it's a great book, and I'm going to try and pick up the other volumes in the series. The one serious flaw is that the index is terrible, but, hell, compared to most gaming indexes it's a masterpiece.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)