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Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand. By Kathryn Rountree. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. xii +223 pp. £20.99 (pbk). ISBN 0-415-30360-5
Kathryn Rountree's monograph Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is one of a number of scholarly texts devoted to the study of the feminist spirituality movement world-wide. Recent examples include Jone Salomonsen's Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (2002), Susan Greenwood's Magic, Witchcraft and the Other-world: An Anthropology (2000), which examines British practices, and Cynthia Filer's Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (1993). There are older examples, which themselves became part of the movement's development, in Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979; second edition 1986) and Tanya Luhrmann's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-day England (1989). The most comprehensive study (which studies the studies as well as the actual phenomenon of modern paganism, and covers both Britain and America) is, of course, Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999). So what does Rountree's book add to our knowledge of this movement?
Its primary contribution is that its focus is New Zealand. Antipodean witches have been examined in previous studies such as Lynne Hume's Witchcraft and Paganism in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997),...