This book is very much a mixed bag. On the plus side, it is in many ways the most useful primarily-Mage book for dealing with Spirits. Chapter 3 has a lot of useful things in it, regarding what's in the Umbra, how spirits relate to each other and to mages, etc. It has the clearest delineation of the different levels of spirit (Gaffling, Jaggling, Incarna, Celestine) that I've seen in a Mage book as well. The appendix has some useful things, many of the rotes are good, the fetishes and talens provide a fun contrast to the usual lists of talismans, and even some of the merits and flaws are interesting.
And then there's chapters 1 and 2. These chapters are largely terrible. They seem to be trying to distance shamanism from the Dreamspeakers so hard that they end up sounding like Euthanatoi and occasionally Ecstatics, and the Dreamspeakers just wouldn't qualify. There are a lot of strange choices in the writing, including making the viewpoint character a Jewish kid being introduced to worship of the orishas, which has its own problems. On top of all that, almost every bit of history of cultural discussion is factually incorrect. Claims like the middle east not having indigenous shamanistic practices (there exist books titled things like "Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism" by respected rabbis) and the discussion of Africa has a distressing sense of Noble Savage to it.
In general, the book ends up mixed, and the first two chapters on Shamanism in practice are mostly negative, but the discussion of spirits and the Umbra is one of the clearer ones in the game line, despite there being two entire books dedicated solely to the Umbra.
|