Practical Protection Magick: Guarding & Reclaiming Your Power
Power Protection – click on the image below for more information.
Power Protection
Embrace your innate warrior skills—knowledge, balance, and wisdom—and amp up your personal power. This helpful handbook is chock-full of protection witchery and psychic self-defense techniques you can use to keep yourself and your home strong, secure, and protected. With her trademark humor and candor, best-selling author Ellen Dugan teaches how to weave safe and sensible protection magick into your Craft practice and daily life. This unique practical guide reveals how to pinpoint your
Practical Protection Magick: Guarding & Reclaiming Your Power
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Beast Island
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Power Protection
Beast Island
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Lecture series on Power Electronics by Prof. K.Gopakumar, Centre for Electronics Design and Technology, IISc Bangalore. For more details on NPTEL visit nptel.iitm.ac.in
A good starting place that falls short,
This book is ok. It’s a really good starting place for most people, and it’s something I would recommend if Jane Doe asked me what to do about protection and defense. This sort of book is desperately needed. I’m glad it’s out there. The author did some great things, and she fell woefully short in a few key areas. I’ll break it down:
The Good
1. She starts with a quiz to inventory your psychic proclivities, then helps you work throughout the book to understand how they make you strong and vulnerable against different challenges. Different kinds of attack are broken down into what kinds of warning bells you might get and how to handle them. Good stuff.
2. The emphasis on the bulk of what we all encounter being unintentional or not necessarily malicious is important. We all have the urge to strike out when threatened. Giving readers practical mundane things to do and gracious yet firm ways to handle situations is excellent. You will read it and go, “Oh THAT’S how to handle the guy who creeps me out at work.” And you will feel better about it having smooth, simple ways to deal with it.
3. There are some things people at every level of experience can learn. No matter what path you follow, you won’t have to worry about karmic repercussions from using her methods. It’s mostly defensive work.
The Not So Good:
1. Sections on specific kinds of attack, like psychic vampires, are very repetitive, yet they present an incomplete picture of the sort of attack and a very limited number of ways to deal with it. I would have loved to have seen explanations of different shielding techniques and ways to visualize them. I don’t have to work to avoid touches from people if I’ve made my aura spiky at them and kept them at a distance in the first place.
2. The emphasis on common problems is good, but what about when what you’re facing is an especially malicious version of a common threat? Variations to add oomph to things like house cleansing rituals is something easy and really important when someone needs it. Sage, holy water, and intent aren’t always enough to really send something packing. In the same vein, stronger warding or even minor offensive techniques should be in here. Mirroring techniques to send an attack back on the sender have been around for ages and don’t violate even strict interpretations of “harm ye none”.
3. For such a sorely needed book, I was really sad that it didn’t go beyond what I consider to be very basic, intro-level stuff. I get being cautious with the kind of knowledge you hand out when you don’t know the experience level or capability of your readers. It’s wise. But there’s this whole level above what’s in this book that is still safe, still doable by beginners, and are bigger and stronger than what’s in here. There’s a big gap between this and some of the more aggressive Traditional methods that not everyone is comfortable with (or should be doing). I really wanted a book I could hand off to people that would teach simple, useful techniques beyond the basic stuff they should already be doing. This isn’t it, but it’s not a bad place for people to start.
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|Psychic Self-Defense for the Twenty-First Century,
While Psychic Self-Defense was an excellent book, I believe that Practical Protection Magick is a fantastic alternative who would find Fortune’s work hard to stomach – which is why I would recommend this book first.
As always, Ellen’s tone is down-to-earth, and she makes what can be an oh-so-serious subject fun, and she keeps the mood light-hearted – otherwise everything is very matter-of-fact, and she doesn’t try to scare the reader. She covers everything from psychic awareness, to recognizing a psychic attack, hauntings; how to recognize emotional and psychic vampires, along with both simple (and more complex) rituals as well all kinds of brilliant ideas for effective protection magic. I also like the fact that she included chapters on physical health, and how that ties into your spiritual health and how it affects your spell-casting as well as defend yourself from negative energy.
I really love how this book progresses, starting out with the basics and slowly adding on, which is helpful when building a solid foundation in Witchcraft, especially when dealing with something like psychic self-defense and protection magic.
The book is broken down like this:
The author starts out by talking about psychic awareness, and how to recognize your own psychic gifts. There are four quizzes for each area, for areas such as clairaudience, clairvoyance, empathy, and intuition – the quizzes aren’t long and detailed, but short and sweet and give you a fairly good idea where you’re at psychically. She then goes on to lists not only the strengths of each ability, but she also talks about the weakness of each ability. At the end of this chapter she includes a simple spell to enhance your abilities.
I thought this was an excellent idea, because it allows you to recognize how you ‘receive’ psychic information, as well as how to enhance it so you can recognize what kind of energy is directed toward you.
Chapter two starts out with another quiz, to allow you to assess where you are with your craft and how your personality and/or geographical location, as well as personal experience. She then goes further, talking about what a psychic attack is, and what would motivate someone to ‘psychically’ attack someone; and what the symptoms are if you suspect that you are under such an attack. There is also a fantastic bit on ghosts and how to handle them.
Chapters three and four deal with both emotional and psychic vampires, how to recognize them, and what you should do if you happen to encounter one. There is a small bit at the end of chapter four where she goes into why psychic shielding alone is usually not enough, especially when dealing with vampires.
Chapter five deals exclusively with physical fitness, and how it relates to spiritual ‘fitness’, and how to the two interconnect –
she includes some self-healing rituals to help with both physical and psychic fitness.
The last couple of chapters deal with warding, creating enchanted items to protect your home (such as brooms, wreaths, and hex signs), charging them, which includes a small bit on gargoyles and protective symbols and how you can use those to further protect your home. There is also information on curses and hexes, how to recognize them, the cost of casting one; and how to get rid of them. The last part deal with correspondences for herbs, crystals, and colors to use in your protection rituals; as well as deities you can call on and how to work with different phases of the moon concerning protection rituals/spells.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg!
In closing I know that some people may disagree with this statement, but I think that this book could easily replace Psychic Self-Defense by just the sheer amount of detail in this book – it’s not only practical but the amount of detail is amazing.
I highly recommend it.
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|Practical Protection Magick,
This review originally appeared on The Magical Buffet website on 3/24/11.
Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. I was recently sent not one, but two different books about protecting yourself against evil or malicious entities or magic users to feature on The Magical Buffet. This has always been an area of research that interests me, and my bookshelves are a testament to that fact. Still, two books in one month. I can’t help but wonder if the universe is onto something that I haven’t figured out yet.
Hopefully I’ll be sharing an interview with the author of the other book I received, so I won’t be discussing it here. Today I’m going to talk about “Practical Protection Magick: Guarding & Reclaiming Your Power” by Ellen Dugan. Readers may remember that I interviewed Ellen Dugan back in 2009 when she was promoting “Book of Witchery”. Although straight forward and hopefully informative, the interview doesn’t do justice to Dugan’s casual, witty writing style. That’s a “my bad” on my part. That part of Dugan’s personality is polished to a shine in “Practical Protection Magick”.
Unlike many books I own that discuss protecting yourself from magical or psychic effects, Dugan focuses more on you than what’s going on outside of you. Through some simple to take quizzes you determine your psychic specialties, and then learn what that means in terms of your strengths and weaknesses when confronted with magical or psychic attacks. Dugan focuses on self-esteem, physical fitness, and awareness. The more confident you are, the less likely you are to become prey to an attack. The concept of knowing, claiming, or reclaiming your own power is a big part of the work Dugan suggests. Not only does she address genuine magical means of being under attack, but also talks about dealing with emotionally draining people and drama queens. They may not be magical, but Dugan assesses their actions as just as damaging as intentional magical attack (which I agree with). And I should also mention that “Practical Protection Magick” emphasizes ruling out other things before jumping to the conclusion that you’ve been cursed, hexed, given the evil eye, or any other magical or supernatural attack.
“Practical Protection Magick” is a well researched book dealing with magic and the supernatural, but what makes it stand out from the crowd is its “self-help” angle. Many books will list protection deities or crystal and herbs for protection (all of which are featured in this book too), but Dugan’s emphasis on self improvement as perhaps the best, and most consistent means of protection is unique and a welcome change of pace. Reading this book feels like getting advice from one of your very good friends: it’s a pep talk, a cautionary tale, and loaded with words to live by.
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