About this item
"Witches are gathering."When most people hear the word "witches," they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, witchcraft is a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day magic.Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon.
About the Author
Alex Mar is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Her first book, WITCHES OF AMERICA, was a New York Times Notable Book in non-fiction, a New York Times Editors' Pick; among The Millions' "Most Anticipated Books" of 2015, The Believer's "Favorite Books" of 2015, and Huffington Post Books' "Most Notable" of the year; as well as a Marie Claire "Top Book-Club Pick." Some of her recent work has appeared in The Believer, Wired, New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Elle, Tin House, and The Oxford American (where she is a contributing editor) . She was nominated for a 2018 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and her essays were included in both Longreads' and BuzzFeed's "Best of 2016" year-end lists. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic, now streaming on Amazon Video. Mar is currently at work on her second non-fiction book, for Penguin Press.
