cover image BECOMING THE ENCHANTER: A Journey to the Heart of the Celtic Mysteries

BECOMING THE ENCHANTER: A Journey to the Heart of the Celtic Mysteries

Lyn Webster Wilde, . . Putnam/Tarcher, $24.95 (303pp) ISBN 978-1-58542-182-4

Readers who like to flirt with the supernatural and have a penchant for Celtic intrigue will relish this trek through the borders of consciousness. Written by a British television producer with a gift for concise descriptions of the utterly fantastic, the memoir details what happens when she is challenged by an acquaintance to become a "woman warrior." Her aim? To help revive the mysteries of ancient British tradition through making pilgrimages to ancient holy places, helping to create dramatic mythical re-enactments and entering into what may truly be mystical experiences (or what skeptics might call self or group-induced hypnosis). The endearingly down-to-earth writer finds, and sometimes loses, fellow pilgrims willing to play elaborate and occasionally spooky mind games to unravel the riddle of the "house of Arianrhod," the virgin who bears a child. "Everything is One, and we must never forget it," one of the book's "wise elder" figures tells the author. "This is why there is no need for a battle between paganism and Christianity: the truth is indivisible." Sometimes gliding and sometimes lurching between her mythic quest and the necessities of hearth and home, Wilde is honest about the human cost of obsession with the "Otherworld": one fellow seeker temporarily abandons her family for another group member. Others, including the author, mine the boundaries of psychological disintegration. Defiantly impractical, often a touch self-indulgent, this interior travelogue ends as the author achieves her own quest for secret knowledge. Now it is up to readers, she suggests, to make their own journeys beyond space and time.(Oct.)