Touch the Earth Kiss the Sky by Diotima Mantinela

4 Stars

240 Pages
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd, Llewellyn Publications
Release Date:

Nonfiction (Adult), Religion, Spirituality

The book is divided into the following chapters.

Chapter 1: Stations of the Sun
Chapter 2: Science on the Bleeding Edge
Chapter 3: Magic(k)
Chapter 4: Yule – The Winter Solstice
Chapter 5: Self and Cosmos
Chapter 6: Imbolc – The Winter/Spring Midpoint
Chapter 7: Energy, Ritual, and Practice
Chapter 8: Ostara – The Spring Equinox
Chapter 9: The Temple of the Soul
Chapter 10: Beltane – The Spring/Summer Midpoint
Chapter 11: Animism, Gods, and Offerings
Chapter 12: Litha – Summer Solstice
Chapter 13: Connecting with the Land
Chapter 14: Lammas – The Summer/Autumn Midpoint
Chapter 15: Taking Psi Out for a Spin
Chapter 16: Harvest Home – The Autumn Equinox
Chapter 17: Communicating with Spirits
Chapter 18: Samhain – The Autumn/Winter Midpoint
Chapter 19: Finding Your Path

The book explains how the wheel of the year is celebrated. There are meditations, exercises, and journal prompts for each chapter. There is a great list of resources and list of suggested reading. If you are looking for different ways to honor the seasons, this would be a good book.

Touch the Earth, Kiss the Sky is a very thorough book where the author describes a spiritual path that brings the reader back to the gifts that nature gives us. I really appreciated the author's approach by providing guided ways to celebrate the wheel of the year while also informing the reader about how they can enhance their own spirituality. I would recommend this book to readers who would like to identify less with a label and work more on connecting with spirit.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advanced reader's electronic copy in exchange for my honest review.

Diotima Mantineia’s writing is good as always. I hover didn’t connect with the book like I wanted to. I’m sure there will be plenty of people that do. It’s just not for me.

Even if it's well written and there's food for thought my rational mind didn't appreciated it and it fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This book really confused me and I ended up DNFing this one because it just didn't work for me at all. I wanted to love it but it just failed to pull me into it and explain things better.


Go Into This One Knowing: confusing

This book tackles a timely and controversial topic with great tact, insight, and nuance. As witches and mages in the 21st century, we grapple both with our own spiritual development, and with the changing landscape of an often pseudo-rational postmodern society that typically rejects the very notion of magic.

We delight in human reason as much as anyone, but reconciling our own very real spiritual experiences with what science seems to tell us can be difficult. It’s a topic addressed in many “magic 101” books, but I think it deserves much more consideration. Diotima Mantineia’s book provides that, and is entirely devoted to this seeming paradox of postmodern magical life.

I was a bit skeptical when I saw that an early chapter focused on reconciling spirituality with modern scientific theories. It shouldn’t have surprised me; the very topic of the book mandates that science be addressed in this context.

It’s unfortunate, but I’m used to reading a lot of bad takes about quantum mechanics and the “Law of Attraction.” Diotima Mantineia’s dive into these topics was a breath of fresh air, though.
As a layperson, I can’t really critique her appeals to quantum physics, except to say that they’re the most nuanced and well-developed that I’ve seen in a spiritual book.

I was stunned at this author’s refreshingly down-to-earth (no pun intended) views on the “Law of Attraction.” She warns against its misapplication, but also notes that the actual order of the cosmos may well be several degrees more complex than any New-Age-prosperity-gospel might have you believe.

This segues quite naturally into a full discussion of spiritual bypassing and the traps of the love-and-light movement. She acknowledges that even people with the best of intentions can fall into toxic mindsets, and gives solid information on crawling out of them.

Did I mention the book is organized around the Wheel of the Year? The author begins with an overview of the Wheel and its origin, and then presents a lesson for each spoke. Each contains a “Touch the Earth” portion or exercise designed to ground to reader and put them in touch with physicality. The “Kiss the Sky” portions deal with the more ethereal side of things. They complete each other wonderfully.

All in all, I can’t help but give this excellent book five out of five stars! I’ve been glancing around for other books by the same author, and have not found any, but I hope Diotima Mantineia will continue writing. I know I’ll be in line to get anything new that she writes!

A fair bit of this book enriched some of the lessons I learned from Laura Tempest Zakroff’s Weave the Liminal. If you want my recommendation, I’d suggest reading this book alongside that one, because they complement each other in a magnificent way. You can kind of pair books together like wine and a good meal, I suppose.
I look forward to future books by Diotima Mantineia, and will likely read them voraciously.

I have been a fan of Diotima’s writing both online as well as in Pagans & Witches Magazine for quite some time, so I was definitely excited to get my hands on this book. Touch The Earth, Kiss the Sky: Allowing the Rational Mind to Welcome Magic & Spirituality by Diotima Mantineia is a beautifully balanced blend of intellect and intuition, astrology and magic, science and spirituality, introspection and observation, skepticism and belief. Diotima expertly guides us through the cycles of the heavens, the world around us, and our inner worlds and thereby transform ourselves and our lives.

We can look at Touch the Earth, Kiss the Sky as both a “right-brain” and a “left-brain” approach for the seeker of magick. As such, the book’s exercises throughout the book are either labeled “Touch the Earth” which is a more logical, skeptical, and rational approach to the ideas presented in the book, while “Kiss the Sky” exercises are more intuitive, spiritual, and divine focused. I particularly enjoyed how solid her science was in this book among a sea of psuedo-science (or at the least questionable science) in other modern magickal books.

This book is a goldmine of wisdom, intelligence, and insight. Coaching the reader through fantastic exercises and practices, Touch the Earth, Kiss the Sky is sure to enhance any reader’s connection and understanding of the Mysteries through direct experience as well as contemplation. There’s a unique richness of discernment and perception that fills every single page of this book. Diotima’s writing and teaching style is easy to understand, integrate, and follow along with making this book suitable for teachers and students of the Mysteries regardless of their experience level. I highly recommend, specifically to the skeptical though open-minded seeker or practitioner. As such this becomes an invaluable guide to both teachers and practitioners that may have to approach or teach certain ideas to those who are more skeptical or analytically minded.

The author does bring up some nice points and things to do. But I did not connect that well with the writing - where others more likely would.