First and foremost the reader needs to know before going in that this is a book discussing the way that the standard binary polarity as heavily used in paths like those in Gardenarian Wicca can be modified to better suit one's identity and become more open for members of your group who may not be comfortable with these models. I feel like the majority of the audience who will benefit from reading and working with this book are those who began and became established within the polarity centered paths of paganism and are now seeking ways to expand their understanding of how these polarities work beyond societal views and paradigms of gender they now find limiting in the old contexts. Gender, sexuality, personal identity, spiritual truth and the nature of connection all come up here and get a discussion that seeks to help broaden the limits of past ritual and religious structures and allow solitary, couple centered, and group practitioners to experiment with their understanding and reform them to better suit the needs of those involved. It may or may not be useful to those whose path is more eclectic, less heavily grounded in ritual magic, or other paths that are more herbal and intuitive centered than energetic but it truly does ask the reader to consider the way they view personal connections with many identities which may not actually suit those your intuition senses to be in alignment with your own needs and seek what is.

Deborah Lipp is one of my favorite pagan author and always found her books thought provoking and useful.
This one was very interesting and I learned a lot and found a lot of food for thought.
Well written and useful.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Great thought provoking book that makes us think outside of the “normal binary”.
I really enjoyed this read and I believe the book adds value to both beginners and seasoned magic practitioners alike.
Definitely recommend if you want to expand your experiences and have a more inclusive practice.

Thank you to the publisher and the author for providing an eARC in exchange for a honest review.

tl;dr This book makes you think about polarity and how to fit it into your practice with the general framework most people share today. It would be good if it became a shared classic drawing a new baseline for future work. Well done Deborah!

Things I struggled with while reading:

* The first section is too short and shallow to be of real use but may be useful for some readers. Contrasting this with the second section (where case studies of binaries are provided), it feels not quite there yet. In particular I'm thinking of the oft-cited example of yin-yang 陰陽 but the introduction of this particular idea into the European society of the 1700s (let's say Leibniz) which then probably trickled down into the beloved mystical example we now love today is something that's completely left out. This is a gap in the general occult knowledge that urgently needs to be filled, but perhaps not in this book.

* The selected binaries are generally good and inclusive (e.g., self vs. other, dominance vs. submission) as they can be prompts for further meditation on them. Despite this, I am gonna go full-on lexical semanticist here and say that choosing particular antonymic pairs without considering if there are other ones available for some terms is cherrypicking and like those sugary cherries they put in cocktails this should be avoided. Consider the provided Death vs. Rebirth (p. 233) but what about Death vs. Life or Death vs. Birth, those clearly are also in polar opposition.

* Some things fundamentally are not binary polarities and Lipp does mention this in relation to the four elements. I was hoping that non-binary (in the sense of more than 2 poles) polarities would also get more attention. That would have really made this an even better book. As it stands, it really is Bending the binary throughout most of it, while I think the book wanted to be Playing with polarities. Or at least that's what I was hoping for.

Things I particularly loved:

* The book reads quite personal and down-to-earth. That is good.

* The polarised Tree of Life at the end was a neat finding and its inclusion in the book is something I will definitely take from this to sit with and climb on, I guess lol.

* The what's next section has some really good tutorials that follow Lipps' earlier work and are hence very clear and instructive.

* The focus on the liminal space / the union that is created from two polarities. This is somewhat of a philosophical trick (similar, though perhaps not entirely equal to, thesis-antithesis-synthesis) but it is a very useful one.

All in all a thought-provoking book. I should probably mention that I got an advanced copy through NetGalley and I don't regret doing so.