Sophie Bergman – författare

Candle magic is often taught as a list of colours, oils, herbs, and ready-made spells. This book goes deeper. Candle Magic is a serious, practical guide to working with flame, wax, colour, intention, timing, petitions, spell structure, safety, ethics, and the ordinary actions that must follow ritual if the work is going to mean anything.Sophie Bergman begins with the central truth many books skip: a candle is not a shortcut. It is a tool. The wax receives the work. The wick carries it. The flame releases it. But the practitioner still has to know what they are asking for, why they are asking, what belongs to them, what does not, and what must be done after the candle goes out.Inside this book, candle magic is treated as a disciplined practice rather than a performance. You will learn how to choose the right candle shape, size, colour, and burn time for the work in front of you. You will learn how wax type, wick quality, holders, dressing oils, herbs, petitions, placement, and flame behaviour affect the spell. You will also learn how to recognise the difference between a meaningful burn and a badly made candle, too much oil, a draught, or unsafe preparation.The colour section gives each major candle colour proper attention instead of reducing it to a single word on a chart. White, black, red, pink, green, gold, blue, yellow, orange, purple, brown, silver, and grey are explored as symbolic languages with practical uses, emotional tones, common mistakes, suitable oils and herbs, and example workings. Colour is treated as a living part of spellcraft, not a law to obey blindly.The book also teaches the foundations that make candle work effective and responsible: how to prepare a candle, how to write a clear petition, how to carve and dress wax without overloading it, how to build a working from intention to closure, how to keep records, how to dispose of remains, how to interpret signs without drifting into fear, and how to avoid using magic as a substitute for action, care, medical support, legal help, or honest decisions.Safety is not pushed to the side. Fire safety, smoke, ventilation, essential oils, pets, children, shared homes, rented spaces, bedrooms, bathrooms, long-burning candles, jar candles, LED alternatives, and discreet practice are all handled as part of the work itself. In this book, safety is not an interruption to magic. It is part of the discipline of fire.Candle Magic also addresses the ethics many spell books avoid: love work without coercion, protection without paranoia, banishing without obsession, prosperity work without fantasy, grief work without false healing promises, and the temptation to use ritual to control people or delay necessary action. The result is a book for readers who want witchcraft that is grounded, useful, honest, and serious enough to survive contact with real life.The final section offers a thirty-day candle practice that moves from simple observation to complete spellwork. Through daily exercises and practical workings, you will build skill gradually: watching flame, handling wax, choosing colour, writing petitions, preparing candles, closing rituals, recording results, and finally casting complete workings for protection, banishing, money or work, love without manipulation, grief or recovery, home blessing, and a working of your own.This is not a book of pretty candle spells with vague promises attached. It is a full guide to learning how candle magic works, where its limits are, how to practise safely, and how to bring fire, colour, wax, word, and action into one clear piece of work.A candle does not do the work for you. This book teaches you how to do the work with the candle.

What if the question you have been afraid to ask is also the most honest one?Not a question about style. Not a question about trend, costume, or performance. A deeper one. A quieter one. A question that may have followed you for years without ever finding the right language.Am I a witch?This book is not a spellbook, a shopping guide, or an invitation into spiritual theatre. It is a grounded recognition guide for people who have always sensed that their inner life does not fit the ordinary explanations they were given. For those who have known things before they could explain them. For those whose bodies answered first. For those who have always lived in unusual relation to pattern, nature, atmosphere, symbol, solitude, and the hidden structure of things.Through clear, unsentimental chapters on intuition, the body, the mind, outsiderhood, suppression, discernment, shadow, and private recognition, Am I a Witch? helps readers separate truth from fantasy and self-knowledge from performance. It asks difficult questions and refuses easy ones. It does not flatter. It does not recruit. It does not ask you to become someone else.Instead, it asks whether you are willing to see more clearly who you have been all along.This is a book about naming what has already been living in you. About recognising the structure of a life that may have felt strange, excessive, or difficult to explain. About understanding sensitivity, symbolic thinking, body knowledge, and nature-bond not as decorative traits, but as part of a deeper pattern that deserves better language.If you have spent your life feeling slightly outside ordinary explanations, this book offers something rarer than reassurance.It offers recognition.

The Moon and the Practice is a serious guide to lunar witchcraft for readers who want more than pretty moon language and recycled ritual advice.Sophie Bergman begins with the actual moon: phase, light, orbit, timing, visibility, tides, place, and observation. From there, she builds a grounded lunar practice that separates astronomy from symbolism, history from fantasy, and useful ritual from spiritual performance.This book covers the full lunar cycle: new moon beginnings, waxing growth, first-quarter resistance, full moon visibility, waning release, dark moon rest, eclipses, moon water, dream work, lunar astrology, mansion timing, record keeping, and a full thirteen-lunation year of practice.It is not a book about letting the moon run your life. It is a book about learning to notice, choose, record, act, release, and return.For practitioners who are tired of vague mysticism, The Moon and the Practice offers something steadier: lunar work with discipline, honesty, and a real sky above it.

You already know the word. You may not know what it has cost.The name Witch has been pressed onto women accused in early modern courts, reclaimed by feminist movements, sold on candle labels, and built into religions — and in some parts of the world it is still getting women killed. Sophie Bergman's The Witch in the Room is the first book to trace all of that at once: where the figure came from, what was done in her name, why she is everywhere now, and what serious engagement with her actually requires.Beginning with the cunning women and healers who worked in the rooms where bodies broke down — the labouring women, the sick children, the households tipping toward ruin — Bergman follows the Witch through the great European persecutions and the demonological machinery that turned village suspicion into administrative killing, through Romantic romanticisation and the feminist reclaiming of the 1960s and 70s, through the birth of Wicca under Gerald Gardner, and into the WitchTok feeds and lifestyle aesthetics of the present day. Drawing on trial records, restitution petitions, primary testimonies from women imprisoned in Salem, and the work of scholars from Silvia Federici to Carlo Ginzburg, the book never lets history become decoration.What distinguishes this book is what it refuses. It will not tell you that the women hanged at Salem were proto-feminist healers systematically eliminated by male medical authority — that story is too clean, and the scholarship has moved on. It will not tell you that every modern use of the word is equally valid. It will not treat the ongoing murders of women accused of witchcraft in Tanzania, the Congo, and Papua New Guinea as the same condition as aesthetic consumption in a Western city. The distinctions are the argument. The Witch in the Room asks what remains when the flattering blur is stripped away — and finds something harder, stranger, and more worth keeping than the culture's current version.Essential reading for anyone who has ever felt claimed by the word, anyone drawn to the history of persecution and survival, and anyone suspicious of the way a serious subject gets sold back to the people it matters to most.For readers of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches, and Emma Wilby's Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits — and for every reader who has stood in a bookshop sensing that the shelf was lying to them.The Witch is in the room. This book tells you what she is actually made of.

Tarot becomes more meaningful—not less—when its history is told accurately.Tarot did not begin as an ancient Egyptian mystery or a secret book of supernatural wisdom. It developed from Renaissance card games and was gradually transformed by artists, occultists, publishers, and generations of readers.In Tarot Without Myth, Sophie Bergman offers a clear, historically grounded introduction to how tarot became the symbolic practice we recognize today. Moving from the earliest surviving cards through the Marseille tradition, Etteilla, the Golden Dawn, the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, and the Thoth Tarot, this book separates documented history from attractive legend without dismissing tarot's enduring value.You will discover:• how tarot emerged and changed over time• why familiar myths about tarot became so influential• how symbols, context, intuition, and projection shape interpretation• how to ask useful questions and choose effective spreads• how to read without exaggeration, dependency, or false certainty• how to establish clear ethical boundaries when reading for yourself or others• how to develop a thoughtful and responsible personal practiceAccessible to beginners yet substantial enough for experienced readers, Tarot Without Myth treats tarot as neither infallible prophecy nor meaningless superstition. Instead, it presents the cards as a rich symbolic system capable of supporting reflection, conversation, and careful interpretation.For readers who want history without sensationalism, practice without dogma, and mystery without misinformation.

The Witch's Shield is a practical guide to protection magic for real life: the body, the home, the threshold, the phone, the bed, and the places where other people's energy lingers after they have gone.Sophie Bergman teaches protection as practice, not performance. Before the candle is lit, the first task is to name what needs protecting, what it needs protecting from, and which method actually belongs to the situation. Not every heavy room needs banishing. Not every strong feeling is intuition. Not every fear deserves a ritual.Inside this book, you will learn how to cleanse after contact, shield before pressure, ward a home, banish what needs leaving, cut what keeps feeding, protect sleep, work safely with tools, and build a simple protection rhythm that can survive ordinary life.You will find practical guidance for grounding, sensing energy, choosing the right shield, clearing rooms, protecting against gossip and harmful attention, working with salt, iron, flame, thread, keys, petitions, bowls, herbs, candles, stones, and sound. You will also learn what not to do: when not to cast, when ordinary action must come first, when a tool is becoming dependency, and when fear is starting to make decisions.This is not a book of vague spiritual reassurance. It is a grounded, careful, deeply usable guide for witches and spiritually sensitive readers who want protection magic that is clear, ethical, safe, and strong enough to live with.By the end, you will have a thirty-day protection system and a personal plan you can actually maintain: one grounding method, one cleansing method, one shield, one home ward, one digital boundary, one sleep practice, one emergency routine, and one way back to yourself when the threshold changes.