The Solitary Practitioner's Teacher

Scott Cunningham was born in Michigan in 1956 and raised largely in California, where he was drawn early to witchcraft and folk magic and was initiated into Wicca in his teens during the 1970s, a decade in which the religion in America was still passed almost entirely through covens and personal lineage. Rather than build a coven of his own, Cunningham turned to writing, and across a career of barely two decades he produced more than thirty books on Wicca, herbalism, crystal magic and folk magic, an output that made him one of the most read authors in the American occult publishing boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

He wrote in a plain, encouraging voice aimed squarely at beginners with no teacher and no local coven to join, treating that isolation not as a deficiency but as a valid starting point for practice. Cunningham suffered from lupus for much of his adult life and died from meningitis, a complication of his illness, in 1993 at the age of thirty six, at the height of his readership; his books have remained continuously in print in the decades since.