Mis-titled, but still excellent stuff

A few things here - I grabbed this after having been... I'll say somewhat "duped" by the author's first book, also poorly titled, and so I approached it with a more than ample dose of skepticism... and I was ready to wade through what I might personally consider unnecessary or unrelated tangential discussion to hear another perspective on a modern practice that someone might be bold enough to place the "Slavic" label on. So many people loved her first book, but I just couldn't get past the colonial syncretism, or the fact it seemed to focus more on spells than what to me seemed far more important - conceptual wisdom or actual history. I was bothered by the divergence between claims of what the book was, and what the actual product seemed to be. It had nothing to do with the ancestral animism that took place before the greedy wolves of Rome or Byzantium learned to herd people into the captive pens of their sun-god. In hindsight... meh... perhaps the reality of a practical "lineage" claim would actually look like that, beholden to the Christian egregore that had worked so hard to stomp out prior world views.

Yet with so few sources of Slavic perspective available in straight-up english, and in spite of my knee-jerk distaste towards perceived highbrow imperialists claiming they had created the spiritual varenyky 1500 years after the fact, there were a few good things in her other title, and hey, this one was Audible and I'd wasted time on much worse since...

Not long into this book I started wondering if the fault might have simply been that of the publisher. Those people can really suck... THEY would be the ones to keep the inherent fear of being canceled or cries of cultural misappropriation far from titles or descriptions. Let them read it first, they would say, and those that disagreed could be labeled as folkish or exclusionary. Win/win. I began to imagine Helvin giving them a manuscript with a different title, something like "Modern Ancestral Magic" and I realized that I was still hung up on the idea of "Slavic", which means vastly different things to many different cultures. Alright, I didn't throw this one on the floor upon reaching the boring recipe section without the cook having explained the context of ingredients and preparation. I didn't shut it off, I kept listening and gave it a chance.

So, turns out I think THIS should have been her first book released. It would have made the other far more bearable. This one actually had some legit discussion of "Slavic" ancestral practice, and since Slavs probably weren't randomly dumped onto the earth by aliens, (contrary to what much of the historical record may lead some to believe) the discussion and comparison of other labeled practice IS relevant and even critically important. We're all human, and related at some point.

Is it "Slavic Ancestral Magic"? Nah, not solely, and definitely not enough to warrant the title as there's nothing truly specific that Slavs might be able to lay claim to, but the "ancestral" angle of modern practice, and exactly how the author describes it, is such an all-too-often overlooked yet absolutely critical aspect of the framework to something real, and something much bigger than labels. Helvin gets this, and misleading titles aside, she gets into it for you in this book in a way that transcends tokenism or cliche, and is actually educational and very useful. The great part about it is that she leads with an open hand into developing your own process, based on several varied cultural but applicable paths, one of which is an otherwise previously (in title and description) unmentioned VERY Vodou perspective - enough that it is more than anything "Slavic".

Again, though, there is some discussion of a real Slavic perspective, and as far as Vodou, I think it takes a lot of courage to present your sincerely-held beliefs and practice from the perspective of what some might consider a less-than-traditional cultural initiate on the face of things. Helvin discusses her development and that of her mentors reasonably enough to deter those creeping suspicions of appropriation that might have soured the first book for me, but then again my own experiance and bias may have been more influential to my initial assessment of it than even I suspect. I'll freely admit that I know nothing of traditional African or post-colonial diasporic religion, but what is presented here seems reasonable and logical enough, and it fits in line with what I would perceive as a living tradition that lends more credence to where the actual rubber hits the road, as opposed to who is doing what and who may be offended by that. I think real polytheism or even panentheism would permit agency on the part of both gods and humans to work with whomever they please, and at the end of the day, from certain monotheistic or traditional colonial perspectives, pretty much everythiing is "witchcraft" or "magic" outside of whatever canonical iteration dominates a specific time and space, so maybe a certain level of cultural reciprocity is just not giving a crap about what others think if it works for you, regardless of where it comes from, as long as you're sincere.

Either way, in conclusion, great book, if you can ignore the frankly irrelevant cultural label. Important things are found within, and the author's path is clearly beyond whatever the publisher was attempting to accomplish by a misleading title and description. Helvin provides something much bigger than that, and it's good stuff that will lead to amazing things for the properly-positioned learner able to conceptualize at a level beyond ideas of assigned culture or limited ancestry. The focus here is ancestral work, not Slavic magic in particular, although the former is essential foundation for the latter so it ends up working anyways. I wasn't holding this work to academic or historical standards, rather I listened with an open mind and treated it as an individual perspective on a spiritual practice beyond the constraints of any centralized authority. I enjoyed it, which is why I rated it well.

In terms of Audible presentation, it was well narrarated and other than what I think might be a few regional variants of pronounciations, there were absolutely no issues.

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