Scott Cunningham—The Path Taken: Honoring the Life and Legacy of a Wiccan Trailblazer

By Christine Cunningham Ashworth and Mat Auryn

A moving portrait of the iconic figure who led the way in establishing Wicca in North America—with remembrances of his life by his sister, Christine Cunningham Ashworth, and appreciations written by key figures in today’s world of witchcraft, magic, tarot, and astrology.

The iconic and renowned bestselling author Scott Cunningham (1956–1993) played a significant role in establishing Wicca in North America. His pioneering book Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner radically altered the practice of Wicca, enabling practitioners to self-initiate. Scott’s books, especially his encyclopedias, remain popular today, years after his death. In recent years, Scott has also emerged as a celebrated queer icon, especially in the witchcraft world. Although so many people have come to Wicca and Paganism through his books, little is actually known about Scott Cunningham as a person.
 
His little sister, Christine Cunningham Ashworth, seeks to remedy that. Christine grew up with him, laughed with him, learned with him, fought with him, and shared joys and sorrows. She writes about their childhood, gives a peek into their parents’ lives, and brings to life what it was like to grow up in the Cunningham household. She explores the trajectory of Scott’s magical path and affirms his legacy. Christine shares family photos and lifts the veil from Scott’s life.     
 
Featuring a foreword by Mat Auryn, author of Psychic Witch and Mastering Magick, Scott Cunningham—The Path Taken contains contributions from leading figures in today’s world of witchcraft, magic, tarot, and astrology, including Stephanie Rose Bird, Amy Blackthorn, Storm Faerywolf, Nancy Hendrickson, Dorothy Morrison, Nicholas Pearson, and Benebell Wen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781633413092

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Hearts, Stars, and Numbers

LOSING SCOTT

In March 1990, I had received a phone call from our dad, author Chet Cunningham, telling me that Scott was in the hospital in Massachusetts, and he was very ill.

I knew that Scott was on a book tour on the East Coast, put together by his publisher. He had a couple of people with him to handle details, staffers for the publisher I presume. At any rate, they did quite a bit of travel, starting in Boston and going from there. The following is what I have been told by Dad.

In Salem, the staffers came to pick Scott up from his hotel, but he wasn't waiting in the lobby as usual. Concerned, they called up to his room, but there was no answer. After talking to the hotel manager, he finally agreed to go up and open the room for them, in case something was wrong.

They found Scott on the bed, dressed but semi-conscious. Somehow, they roused him, packed his bags, and they all bundled into a taxi and got him to the best hospital in Massachusetts—Mass General, back in Boston. This was about an hour's drive, from what I understand.

Scott was admitted immediately. A day or so later, and after several tests were done, he was diagnosed with cryptococcal meningitis, a type of fungal disease that is impossibly rare, but that he developed due to his already-compromised immune system.

In short, he had AIDS.

I wanted to go to Scott, to be his advocate. Both Dad and my husband, Tom Ashworth, refused to let me, as I was three months' pregnant with our first child and a hospital was no place for a healthy pregnant woman. Instead, Dad went. When it became obvious that Scott wouldn't be strong enough to travel for quite a while, Dad ended up coming home and Scott stayed for several weeks before he was able to fly back to California. Once back in San Diego, he was immediately transferred to UC San Diego Medical Center, the same hospital where he had conquered his cancer in 1983.

I didn't see Scott for months, until he was back on his feet; and by the time I did, I was very pregnant, and he looked almost normal, if a bit on the thin side. He was sick, yes, but he didn't look sick; rather, it looked like he had beaten it back. He was on daily medications, but I have no knowledge of which medications.

Since AIDS had been around for a decade at this point, I figured he would beat it with the new drugs available. The fact that he was still alive was a strong argument, to me, that he'd do just fine. After all, in 1983 alone, between my husband and me, we lost over fifty people we knew in the theater world to AIDS, and in a very short timeframe—less than six months. The shock as they fell, one by one, seemingly out of the blue, had stunned us. We had watched and raged when the government was slow to react. I hated the homophobia, the closed-mindedness, the smugness of cis-het people as gay men died by the thousands and thousands worldwide. But ten years on, I clung to the fact that medical advances surely had come far. Surely, he'd recover, even though it seemed AIDS was still pretty much a death sentence.

Whatever medications Scott was prescribed in the beginning, it was just before they had come up with the cocktails, those mixes of medicines that were promising. By the time they had worked out the formulas and started prescribing those cocktails, Scott was no longer a candidate to take them. The disease had progressed too far.

Once Scott and I had moved out of the family home in 1978, Dad had taken down the wall between his den and the boys' room and made it one big den slash office. He put a small couch in there, and Mom had her desk too, though she didn't spend much time there anymore. She'd long stopped being able to proofread for Dad. When Scott came home from UCSD Medical, they put him in my old bedroom on a temporary basis until he was well enough to go back to his own apartment, which he did about a month later. Luckily, he'd moved from his apartment on Orange Avenue the previous year, and his new place wasn't far from the parents.

After the AIDS diagnosis in 1990, a lot of my memories are fuzzy, and I'm blaming that on being pregnant and then the new baby (or let's just call the little darlings sleep deprivation experiments, shall we?). Tom and I would come down to San Diego for holidays, birthdays, Mother's Day and Father's Day, as well as a random weekend here and there, and we'd see Scott. I remember my oldest brother Greg was dating someone new, having gotten a divorce a year or so earlier. Scott most emphatically did not like Greg's new significant other (Scott called her the Sergeant) and did not think she was a good match for Greg, though I don't know if he ever told Greg that.

Dad and I kept in loose, but fairly regular, contact. Our family, well. If there's one thing we're not good at, it's reaching out and calling each other (this was pre-cell phones, people). But I knew pretty much how Scott was doing. I knew he was still writing, and still teaching to some extent. Scott and I would mail each other cards, just because. Mine to him still usually had a check in it, though I thought it was totally unnecessary at that point. Why? Well . . .

The answer goes back to 1979 and the early 1980s, after I moved up to Los Angeles to be with my husband Tom (we married in February of 1980). Every now and then, once I had a fairly regular job or at least a temp job from one of the temp agencies I was with, I would send Scott a check and a card, kind of out of the blue. At least, to me it was out of the blue. He would send me cards and letters now and then. We kept that correspondence up until he got too sick and moved in with my parents in late 1992, even though his book sales in the later years were, I assumed, keeping him mostly comfortable.

In 1992, not sure which month but early, probably January, I had come down to see the parents, since it had been a while. Scott and I went to a late lunch together, as it had been . . . well. This was most likely the first time we'd ever gone out to eat together in years that didn't involve fast food.

I told him I was making the trip from L.A., and I'd love to take him to lunch at his favorite restaurant. After all, I had the fancy job at Candle Corporation, a privately held mainframe computer software company, and I could afford it.

We went to a place in Hillcrest, and I drove. He still looked like the brother I grew up with, but his vision was dicey at this point. Not gone, but he had difficulty with depth perception, and hadn't driven a car in quite a

Reviews for Scott Cunningham—The Path Taken

[Alexia Moon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was... wow. I grew up with Cunningham's books, in fact, Living Wicca was my first introduction to Paganism and Witchcraft. Scott Cunningham and Doreen Valiente were two pillars, two inspirations that have shaped my path and the way I devote my service to the community and reading this book gave me a whole new look of one of my role models. It also helped me on my own personal journey, reminding me of my beginnings and my practice and helped me get out of a long mont s rut. I highly highly recommend this book! If you wanna read a book about an influential, kind, queer pagan author, this is the one.

What is remembered lives.