I'm also honored by the dozens of people who've emailed me over the years to ask questions, agree, disagree, or otherwise discuss my works... This tells me I'm reaching the audience I want to reach, which is not a mainstream audience. To me, it is the audience of people who are thinking about their religion, instead of just practicing it...an audience of people who want to engage in debate and thinking about their religious ideas instead of just burning candles or chanting because someone said so...
But I do get asked about so-called fluffy authors, and I do get accused of being one, and in the decade since the first version of my first Wicca book, I have significantly refined my view of why I dislike an author, or why I distrust certain books. You can think of these things sort of like an inverted Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs... at the top we have the big things. If a books sucks on one of the upper levels, it sucks hard enough that it doesn't matter what comes next, the book has MAJOR suck and should be abandoned. Sadly, many of the books I loathe the most come down to the bottom two levels of suck, which means they can be approached as decent source material if you're really careful about it...
And, to that end, I announce my inverted pyramid of suck:
Think of this inverted pyramid as my little tool for determining the amount that a book sucks, as opposed to the technique some people use- which, in the vernacular, can be summed up as 'just hating on an author because the kewl kids do.'
The highest level of suck, the level at which books possessing this suck should not only be warned against but should not be published at all, and if published should be pulled from the shelves, are reserved for those books that violate big ethical concerns that we all agree on. For example, books that are plagiarized (whose content was written by someone else and used without consulting the real author, or which is posted without the author's name and without their permission.) In the Wiccan and Pagan community, genuine whole-book physical plagiarism is rare. It has happened to me (and the person publishing a knock-off version of my book was shut down,) I have been told it has happened to Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft and I've heard rumors of it happening to a number of other authors, but it is thankfully rare. More common still is whole-book plagiarism in the form of netbooks, ebooks and the like, but these books (usually) maintain the author's name, so it's not as bad ethically, it's stealing, yes, but at least no one is lying about who wrote what. (You still should not purchase these stolen books!)
More common, but still on this level of suck are books which consist of ideas or writings taken from elsewhere and not credited to that elsewhere. I'm not talking about little things, like calling Thompson's Rede of the Wiccae by the wrong name when listing it in your book (although you should always cite properly and I think this is a stupid mistake.) I'm speaking of very big deals, like Stepanich's Faery Wicca stuff or the bizarre episode of a Harvard student's allegedly accidental plagiarism in 2006.
There are people who claim that every book should be given a chance.... NO. When a book profits a criminal, anyone who intentionally pays that criminal money is getting coated with the gross and sticky criminality of the whole thing. These books deserve to be pulled off shelves, and people should be warned against these books and the original author(s) should get the money that their hard work went into making...
The next level of suck consists of books that probably do not deserve to be ripped from shelves but certainly should not be recommended reading, do not deserve to be in libraries and if they are released in a revised edition without correcting the problems, should probably be promoted to the first level of suck I discussed and pulled off of shelves. These books usually are not present in the Wiccan community at all, and can be described as books that are physically dangerous to people, places and things. These books represent a real danger to people reading them, such as providing recipes that are poisonous, offering themselves as guidebooks to venomous animals and labeling a picture of a deadly animal as a safe one, suggesting actions that will do gross bodily harm, etc. Off the top of my head I can think of two such books in the Pagan community, one which advocated eating Mistletoe, which probably will not kill you, and another which provides a recipe for 'flying ointment' which goes beyond the entheogens which such things usually contain and right into a list of ingredients which will probably kill you if rubbed into your skin. Since these are stupid mistakes, they should be found and corrected in later editions, and if they are not, you've got to question the purpose of having a later edition... It's actually very easy for a publisher or author to get around these dangerous books, with a boilerplate warning. (Observe the one in the description of The Velvet Glove, a book that describes consuming mandragora or the warning at the top of the ordering page for herbs at this site.)
Beneath these two big categories on the inverted pyramid of suck are books that probably do not deserve to be pulled from shelves, but when weighed one against the other tend to suck more than similar books in their fields. The first such layer of suck involves honesty. Without naming names, I will give two examples of dishonestly in recent books in the Wiccan community. The lack of honesty in these two books suggests that the books should be pulled from the market by their authors as an ethical concern, and they should be edited to make them more honest before they return to shelves.
The first such book has a simple honestly problem. The author claims to be an initiate of a specific tradition of Wicca, and 'proves' this by listing a lineage that is not only inaccurate, but also goes against the way that tradition initiates people. Said author need only cease to claim to be an initiate in the details of the book, and the problem goes away.
The second book has a subtle honesty problem. It consists of a decent book, largely of the author's opinions, with an extensive bibliography that, if taken at face value, seems to imply that the author's opinions are supported by these numerous works. This bibliography, unfortunately, is largely filled with books that do not touch upon the author's views at all and, indeed, do not have any real connection to his work. Some of the books listed, in fact, diverge sharply from the author and I imagine the authors are wondering why they are listed at all... This author's bibliography exists as filler material, and the honesty problem goes away completely if the author turns it into a recommended reading list, or even places some indication in an introduction to the bibliography that these books were instrumental in said author's path, not necessarily in the construction of the book. There is a rumor, in fact, that said bibliography is cut and pasted from elsewhere, which if true puts this book up onto the first level of the pyramid of suck.
The next layer of the pyramid of suck is the scope of a book. I am a firm advocate of Pagan books that say "In our tradition, X, we do action Y for reason Z." Every Pagan author has their limitations. No author speaks for all of us. If an author fills their books will lists of what "real Pagans do" and goes off in terms of the No True Scotsman fallacy, then their book has an inappropriate scope. Books with an inappropriate scope do not deserve to be pulled off of shelves, but should be taken with the largest grain of salt you can lift. I include in these errors of scope three major types of errors:
* Claiming to speak on behalf of all Pagans
* Neglecting to mention that your unique view of something comes from you.
* Grossly oversimplifying something important.
The fifth level of suck is about legitimacy. There are two basic types of legitimacy. The first revolves around the author. Who is this author and on whose behalf does (s)he speak? Is the author open and honest about their qualifications or are they speaking from a position of alleged expertise that, on examination, they do not possess?
The second type of legitimacy is easier to assess for the general reader, and that is does the book possess legitimacy unto itself. This can be best understood as internal consistency. Does the book represent the ethical standards that the book espouses? In terms of Wicca, does the author actually practice what (s)he is suggesting you practice? Does the author claim, for example, to have nothing against non-Wiccan religion and then lambaste Christianity? Can the book be summed up as "do as I say, but not as I do?"
Put simply, if the author is not willing to do what (s)he tells you to, why should you bother with it?
The final layer of suck is called emotion, but it more properly is termed "manipulating emotions" or even "propaganda." It comes in two basic forms, emotional manipulation the author does on purpose and emotional manipulation the author does unwittingly. I personally have no problem with the second, as long as the author is honest with the reader and tells the reader that they feel strongly about a thing and may be biased. The first, however, really has no place in books on religion, or frankly any non-fiction book. You should reason through books with your brain, not with emotions that an author plays like a string. If you find yourself being emotionally jerked around by a book, led to be angry merely because the author wants you to be, or scared merely because the author wants you to be, or distrustful of other authors merely because the author wants you to be, then I suggest putting down that sucky, distrustful book and picking up another.
In the end, no one can tell you what sources to trust, or why. No author is perfect, and no book represents any author perfectly. This inverted pyramid, however, is how *I* judge what books suck, personally, and I think if my criteria helps a single other person the time spent writing this post was worthwhile.
