An Argument for Liber Resh vel Helios

 

Liber Resh vel Helios consists of four solar invocations spaced out through the day: at dawn, at noon, at dusk, and at midnight.  In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the author writes that Liber Resh allows advanced students to make contact with the spiritual energy of the sun and draw power from it.  But I’ve found its basic, psychological benefits to be of greatest use: “The object of this practice is firstly to remind the aspirant at regular intervals of the Great Work.”  It can remind you of how you’re progressing at any given moment of a day and, in terms of weeks and months, show you where you need improvement in your self-development.

If you also keep a daily magical journal, you can note down this practice in order to see when you’re on top of your game, so to speak, or when you’re slipping.  Miss performing one of the four adorations, and you have an instant feedback mechanism for what’s going on in your day / week, magically and personally.  If you regularly practice all four solar adorations daily and consistently throughout the week, you get a sense of your psycho-magical stability and, over time, a sense of how much ashe / chi / prana / inner power you have.  Relate this to the moon phase, the sun phase, the weather, relevant events in the calendar, and things going on in your physical and emotional life, and you have great mini-system for magical self-evaluation.

I wish my teacher would have told me this when I was first starting out.  All he said was, “This is a good thing to do.  It puts you in harmony with the movement of the sun.”  Then he gave me the instructions and some reading references and left me to it.  25 years later, I understand.  But for a long time, I simply did it and thought, “I don’t feel anything.  Is this pointless?”  The only thing that kept me going was the fact that the rituals suggested by my teacher nearly always revealed themselves to me over time.  It just took me about a decade to see the value in Liber Resh.

I don’t think that level of frustration should be necessary.  If you come across this simple ritual in a book like Modern Magick or Magick Without Tears or in one of the more recent Golden Dawn-influenced systems of self-initiation, you might give up on it.  It won’t give you the sort of energetic fireworks that, say, doing the Middle Pillar with the LBRP daily for a month would.  Resh is a quiet, introspective ritual.  If you start practicing it with that in mind, thinking of it more as a daily thermometer for your practice and development, you’ll probably feel less at a loss.

Lots of Crowley’s rituals are like this.  You expect them to be one thing, but their inner reality is something else.  In order to get to that unfoldment in your practice, you need to stick with them and make use of your magical diary.  One day, a ritual will “click” for you and you’ll realize what’s going on.  That, at least, is how it has worked for me.  It takes time, lots of introspection, and sustained effort. 

The Golden Dawn rituals are generally like this as well; though, they tend to be a bit more transparent.  I can’t recommend Peregrin Wildoak’s By Names and Images strongly enough for helping students to see the energetic reality of these and, by extension, waking them up to the way they should think about the Thelemic rites and rituals as well. 

The sacred geometry used in these workings is sometimes referred to as the “linear tradition” in magic and rightly so.  But "linear" doesn't necessarily mean straightforward or self-evident.  Forming a subjective synthesis with them in the spiritual life of the practitioner takes time, faith, diligence, a fair amount of study, and an open mind.  

This is something of an implicit blind built into all the Victorian ceremonial lodge magic we’ve inherited and it’s why I have no sympathy for people willing to mock the basic rituals as unnecessary and overly embellished or (ironically) as too simple.  If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, you will understand the value and use of such work.  But in order to develop those perceptions, you need to put in some long-term effort.  Hopefully, little notes like this post can encourage you to persevere on the path of understanding.

A Review of Jason Miller’s Elements of Spellcrafting: 21 Keys to Successful Sorcery

 

Elements was published over three years ago, but I’m only getting around to this review now in 2020.  So I’m definitely a bit late.  Then again, three years is not a long time when occult books are concerned.  And, really, I’m reviewing this mostly for my own magical reasons.  Several people have mentioned the book (and Jason) to me recently, using language that had a kind of “fairy dust” on it, a glimmer of magical resonance that made me take notice.  Once I started paying attention, I realized what I was being asked to do.

This sort of resonance emanates from my UPG.  It’s a highly subjective form of prophecy, of passive divination.  In Eckankar, it’s called “Golden-tongued Wisdom.”  In ancient Greece, it was called “kledon.”  In some areas of modern art, it’s called “found art.”  Crowley ritualized it as part of “The Oath of the Abyss.”  But it all means roughly the same thing: something or someone within your perceptual, subjective world is talking to you, pointing something out, and you should listen.

Sometimes it comes through a kind of conspicuous emphasis in one of the physical senses.  Sometimes, it’s complete pareidolia.  Other times, you’ll hear a snatch of conversation or experience a bit of inadvertent stichomancy when a book falls open to a random passage speaking directly to something on your mind.  Not all divination is deliberate.  Not all prophecy is dramatic.  And not all messages are solicited by the diviner.  Sometimes—in fact, I’d say most of the time if we’re paying attention—the universe speaks in the language of everyday things, of nature, and of selective perception. 

Which is to say, it’s a psychic event.  How you can tell it’s happening is a matter of clairsentience and experience.  That’s the best way I can describe it.  Do magic for a couple decades and your “third eye” becomes relatively dependable, your “sight beyond sight,” to borrow a phrase from the Thundercats.  You notice the pixie dust on, say, the title of a book in a store or in something a friend is saying to you over coffee.  The book might have nothing to do with magic or spirituality.  Your friend might be talking about the fish in her fish tank.  But the words seem to stand out.  They have a certain glow.  You pay attention.  And then you get the message.

In other words, I can’t say in any rational or defensible way why I knew I should review this book.  I just “got the message.”  So I said to the universe, “Yes, okay, sure, I’ll review it on my new blog.”  But I didn’t say when.  And, to be honest, I thought I might just put it off indefinitely.  I’ve found Jason’s recent courses and writings distasteful for the same reasons others have.  But signs and symbols important to me started to crop up in connection to doing the review.  I have an understanding with a certain ibis-headed deity and I think that’s a large part of why I kept getting reminded to write this.  Thoth is always on my mind to some extent. 

Tonight, I sat down to work on something else—and couldn’t.  Total writer’s block, which I don’t often get.  So I said to the universe, which is to say, Thoth, which is to say my daemonic Self:  “Okay, have it your way.” 

I really am grateful for all the books that come to me whenever I want them and for this modest talent of mine in stringing one word after another.  In my cosmology / UPG, those are gifts from Thoth.  I suppose writing things when he sends me kledon is the least I can do to show my gratitude. 

So tonight, this is what I’m writing for the Lord of Time and Master of Letters.  I make this invocation at the beginning of my review, that I will be free of delusion, that my words will be free of error, and that my perceptions will convey truth. 

Nuk per Akhenptah, ami-ab

Per-ab ami- kshat. Anksh-a em t’ett’a-a.

I am pure of heart

Within the purity of my body.

As the sacred lotus opens each morning at the touch of Ra,

I pray that my eyes may be opened.

As I climb the sacred stairs to the sky above,

I ask Ta em Hotep to guide and protect me.

So mote it be.

***

Everyone expects me to tap dance on Jason’s book, principally because on Studio Arcanis, we’ve been openly critical of his Hekate and Cyprian courses.  I’m not going to rehash what we’ve said (and what Jason said when he came back to the forums to defend himself).  Instead, I’ll start by talking about what I like and admire about him and his magical work.

Jason has an eclectic background; he’s definitely a fixture in the magical community; and he’s written some good books.  The Sorcerer’s Secrets and Protection and Reversal Magick are very good.  They emerged from the magical blog trend that seemed to electrify (pun intended) the online international magical community in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

I took Jason’s “Sorcerer’s Secrets” e-course, as did several magician friends of mine, and we all thought it was a solid 101 companion to the book.  Jason can write clearly and he knows how to explain esoteric concepts and techniques in ways that beginners will understand and feel empowered to practice. 

All of this is good.  And, though I can be harsh and would like to see Jason give more substance in his online courses relative to what he charges, I bear him no ill will.  He’s part of the same community, the same family or, if you prefer, the same “invisible college,” as all of us who study and practice occult things.  I suppose you’re always harshest on your own.

Unfortunately, Jason’s reductive, beginner-friendly approach becomes a liability when he tries to write about things beyond frame rituals and basic offering methods.  This is my primary criticism of Elements, which is not a bad book at all.  It could have been titled, The Sorcerer’s Secrets, Part Two.  And though it presents itself as a relatively intermediate troubleshooting guide for those who’ve already started practicing operative magic, it seems more like a book of occult platitudes, giving 21 highly obvious, common sense “keys” to successful practice.

By the time I got to the end, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if someone bought The Sorcerer’s Secrets and really worked those techniques, Elements of Spellcrafting would be mostly unnecessary; if they didn’t work seriously through Jason’s previous book or of they happened to be magically tone-deaf, then none of these tips would do them a bit of good. 

Either way, Elements comes across as superfluous to serious practice—a bit like Jason’s Financial Sorcery seems superfluous to the real mechanics of making and keeping money—but even less useful because at least FS gave some bare-bones money management advice and introduced the (borrowed) concept of the “set point.”

Jason never writes a totally bad book.  He’s too smart and experienced for that.  By “superfluous,” I don’t mean “worthless.”  I simply mean that the book is unnecessary for serious practitioners.  That said, the image of the “serious practitioner” I’m holding in my mind when I say that has a lot to do with my own idiosyncratic perceptions and experiences. 

We call Studio Arcanis a forum for “Advanced Practitioners” and evaluate the information there based on decades of talking about and actually practicing magic.  But no one, not even the most experienced sorcerer or grimoire magician, can see all angles.  So there may be someone who benefits greatly from Elements of Spellcrafting.  I just can’t imagine who that could be.

In the introduction, Jason writes, “I am not claiming to be the smartest, the most powerful, or the wisest Sorcerer on the block—in fact, I know that this is not the case. But I have seen some shit, dear reader, and have learned a lot from it.”  Fair enough.  I’ve practiced magic for about as long as Jason and I’ve seen some shit, too.  It’s unavoidable.  Some shit definitely gets seen on the magical path.  Over on Arcanis, people are always talking about the shit they’ve seen, but they seldom write how-to books based on such shit.  If they do, they buckle down for some serious critique by the community—and rightly so. 

I do wonder about something Jason says two paragraphs later: “If people have ever asked you something like, ‘If spells work, why aren't you more successful?’ this book is for you. The issue is not with the Magic itself, but with the application. If you apply these keys skillfully, no one will ever ask you [that] again.”  

People always ask magicians that question—because great skepticism accompanies great ignorance and fear, all things that motivate questions in the genre of “Prove It!”  Jesus got such questions.  Agrippa got them.  Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Buckminster Fuller, and Big Daddy Frogleg, the hoodoo man down the street, all got that same question.  I’ve gotten it.  You may have, too.  Already, in the introduction, my bullshit detector is starting to go off.

But, as I said above, my project here is not to ride the book down.  So I’ll ask a better question: in my opinion, what’s good here?  What’s useful?  What can a serious magical student make use of?

The first thing I liked was Key 3: “Make Sure Your Life is Enchantable,” a concept that the chaote, Gordon White, once summed up on Runesoup by saying that there has to be a sufficient amount of “chaos” (i.e. potential for influence and change) in a subject for magic to work on it.  In fact, if I didn’t think this was a patently obvious truth, I’d think Jason cribbed it straight off Gordon’s blog. 

But it is true, at least as far as I have seen in my own workings and in the reports other dependable magicians have given.  Jason puts it like this: “The problem this key seeks to solve is forcing Magic to manifest in lives that are not easily adapted to enchantment. The solution is not always an easy one. It may require you to open a business, do some serious personal identity work, or even move to a new city where there are more opportunities than your current location.” 

Actually, Jason put it better in The Sorcerer’s Secrets (quoting Louis Martini): “First comes the working, then comes the work.”  Right.  Make a pathway for manifestation within the subject matter of the working.  You can’t get solid gold Bentleys from the sky.  You can’t get whipped cream from a stone.  If you don’t “back up the work” with mundane effort, the magic won’t flow.

Anton LaVey also said it: “The aspiring witch who deludes herself into thinking that a powerful enough working will always succeed, despite a magical imbalance, is forgetting one essential rule: magic is like nature itself, and success in magic requires working in harmony with nature, not against it.”  Maybe Jason is paraphrasing The Satanic Bible?  He could do worse.  LaVey’s “Book of Belial” is actually a very deep course in practical magic, deeper, I think, than Elements.

Another good one is Key 21: “Maintain Sovereignty”: “Just remember that you hold the agency here. You hold the sovereignty. Don't yield your life over to spirits to make decisions for you. Work with them, even serve them, but maintain your own sovereignty and decisions.”  This is something everyone needs to hear from time to time.  As spiritually minded people, literally “spiritual workers,” we negotiate a difficult path between employing our spiritual contacts to create change and serving them.  For example, I may burn incense and invoke Thoth before writing a review but I will also do that writing if I feel like he’s asking me to do it.  It’s always a give-and-take.

Jason has a few other useful observations: avoid “perpetuating a bad status quo” with sorcery (i.e. using it to avoid having to grow); make use of your genii loci; enchant in large and small ways; know how to judge magical successes and failures; and make an effort to learn and respect the traditions that draw you. 

All of these are useful things that most of us learned along the way by doing.  We learned them firsthand.  And if we hadn’t learned them eventually, we wouldn’t have gotten very far along in our magical studies.  So, yes, the book is not worthless at all.  But it may be totally unnecessary for most practitioners.

Overall, I look back at Elements of Spellcrafting and wish Jason would have written something a bit deeper when it comes to the practice of advanced magic.  Along with his 21 Keys seeming obvious, comes the unsettling idea that he has compiled them from various other writers and traditions—ironically violating his own advice in Key 13: “Practice Sane Eclecticism”: “Don't downplay influences to justify your involvement.”

In magic, we hold some truths to be self-evident.  So compiling and restating them in a single book is fine and might even be useful.  But this doesn’t amount to the sort of wisdom he seems to claim for himself in the introduction when he says, “I have seen some shit.”  The shit he’s talking about here is shit everybody sees, sooner or later.  It’s like giving someone a photo of his own house and saying, “This is where you live.”

Yeah.

Becoming a Big Lucky Hoodoo

 

The mini-system of simple hoodoo rites and rituals that Michael Bertiaux teaches at the beginning of his voluminous Voudon Gnostic Workbook (VGW) is called “Lucky Hoodoo.”  It heads off the first part of the text under the sub-title, “Voodoo Energies,” which is a subtlety that should not go overlooked.  

You can work the Lucky Hoodoo system all by itself, to good effect, without ever progressing into the highly complex astral-visual magic that follows.  In fact, if you are as much of a fan of Brujo Negro’s Voodoo Sorcery Grimoire (VSG) as I am, you’ll see some telling parallels between that and Lucky Hoodoo.  You might want to work them side-by-side (as I am currently doing), deepening and strengthening your grasp of both relatively simple and straightforward systems.  Such work, if you stick with it and keep and open mind, will introduce you to “voodoo energies” as a non-initiate, which is to say, as an independent magician with enough ashe (spiritual essence, power) to work from the outside in, so to speak.

There is a lot of racial-identity polarization right now regarding who can use the terms “voudou,” “hoodoo,” and associated labels.  Most of it is ignorant garbage, sounds a lot like the old Aryan pseudo-histories repackaged in an Afrocentric container, and doesn’t merit unpacking here.  Suffice it to say, initiation might not be available to everyone (which is why it’s called “initiation”), but magic and spirituality definitely are and have less to do with this physical incarnation than with what you feel called in your heart to do.  On this blog and in my house, we love and respect everyone who shows us love and respect; we believe in life and light as well as in death and darkness; and we set lights for a better world in which mankind can come together and evolve as one people.

Yes, ancestors matter.  Yes, there are powers that run with the blood.  Yes, lineages, initiations, and being gifted for the work matter.  But these things aren’t everything, no matter what the practitioner down the street may say in order to keep his or her clientele believing in the exclusivity of his services.  Sometimes, you don’t find the magic—the magic finds YOU.

As long as you’re not making money off someone else’s brand (which is what a lot of metaphysical identity politics seems to be about when you get right down to it), there’s no reason to expect that people won’t let you practice your spirituality in peace.  And if they don’t want to leave you alone, there is an easy solution for that: avoid them.

In any case, and to the consternation of many a brand-conscious conjureman, Bertiaux has given the world a magical system at the start of his book that can not only work for everyone, no matter your ethnicity and skin color, but which functions as a doorway to the deeper mysteries.  To that end, I’m actually reading and referencing six books at once.  For practical work, I’m studying and employing the VGW and the VSG.  For expanded theory and interesting insight, I’m reading Louis Martini’s Waters of Return: the Aeonic Flow of Voodoo and David Beth’s Voudon Gnosis—not because there aren’t more scholarly or more authentically sourced works on the subject but because these are spiritually in line with Bertiaux’s practice.  And I’ll be referencing Kenaz Filan’s The Haitian Vodou Handbook and Ray Marlborough’s Charms, Spells, and Formulas. 

I’ve chosen these texts as a way to view my first-hand initiations and experiences in the past as well as going forward.  For better or worse, they seem to define the outlines of a particular “magical current.”  In the middle, there is The Société Voudon Gnostique and its various partitions and historical offshoots.  Then there is the Kenneth Grant-influenced extension of that work and thought into the OTO and the magical thinking of contemporary British occultism.  Then there is the resonance between these and North American hoodoo and conjure, often (but not always) taking New Orleans “voodoo” and South American ATR systems as relevant points of contact. 

In short, the loa have travelled around the world.  And hoodoo (which is different but related to the magical side of voudon) has developed into the most multicultural magical practice in history.  So this is the metaphysical and intellectual terrain I’m exploring.

Lesson One: Preparatory Dream Work – the UPG Begins

Using Eckankar dream techniques, I’ve explored the astral realm of Maître, the “Master of the Words [Woods] on the Island Under the Sea.”  Bertiaux writes, “[U]nder the sea there is a great forest with all kinds of sea-trees and sea-bushes and sea-plants growing in it.  This is the great woods of the old island of Atlantis.”  This is the imaginal realm of Maître, “the king of the spirits on his island and he is a very powerful god of Voudoo.”

So the first thing to do—and the first “blind” or “trap” in a clever book that trapped and misled me completely when I first read it over two decades ago—is to realize that “Atlantis” is an astral location, an aetheric construction, a working concept in this system.  Bertiaux never explicitly says this, but he is not actually speaking to rank beginners in Big Lucky Hoodoo.  From the start of “Lesson One,” he is asking you to trust the waters, so to speak.  He wants to see if you can use your imagination and visualization to go to this “Woods on the Island Under the Sea.”  If you can go there in the spirit vision, you can do this work.  If you can’t or you aren’t developed enough yet, it will sound like crazy talk at best.

This is both the key to the deeper mysteries of the VGW and a way to open your mind and heart to the aforesaid “Voodoo Energies.”  The magical island in this is not under the physical Atlantic ocean.  It’s sunk deep in the “astral ocean.”  And you have to swim down there into the cold dark on your own.  No warm and comforting spirit will hold your hand.  You must be an explorer of an undiscovered (as yet by you) country.  Bertiaux merely points it out and gives you technology to use along the way.  You’re the one who has to go.

Therefore, as with any dangerous expedition, I did my homework in advance.  Chanting “Hu” before bed, every night for weeks, I’ve descended to this island in dreams, which have involved me being physically dismembered and put back together again in various ways.  I’ve seen fields of walking bones on the bottom of the ocean and chasms that go down into the endless dark (which I imagine are dream portals to other places).  My UPG has been vivid in this respect.

And UPG (or “Unverified Personal Gnosis”) is an integral part to the work of the VGW, right from the start.  Anything that relies on astral, inner plane, experiences will be controversial when discussed publicly.  Studying this means walking a fine line between the inner and the outer, being brave and open enough to experience the former and rational enough to frame it as UPG and not divine revelation for all.  If you follow my writing about the Enochian Aethyrs, you’ll see me talk much the same way about my experiences with those.

Still, UPG is good and really comes into play with more advanced magical study.  Beginning systems are general and suitable for people just getting accustomed to the work, but once you enter the deeper waters, it all becomes very idiosyncratic.  Hence, my writing about this on a personal magical blog and not on Studio Arcanis, which is ostensibly for a wider audience.

After several dream explorations of the realm of Maître (or “Ma-Tr”), I feel ready to investigate Papa Nibbho’s world of the dead.  Only then will I feel like I can perform Lesson One’s “Dedication to the Hoodoo Spirits” again.  I say, “again,” because I performed several Big Lucky Hoodoo workings years ago and had impressive results, but I am now attempting this study more seriously. 

So it is time to re-dedicate more slowly to this work.  The “Voodoo Energies” are present and now, at the beginning, having worked with my dreams and started this blog as a way to record my experiences, I want to penetrate more deeply under the waters and into the earth.  I want to speak with the fire and travel high into the aethyrs—all of which will be accomplished in the fullness of time.

What You Know and Who You Know

Unlike several highly skilled (and opinionated) magicians I know, I don’t have a problem with sorcerers who make their services available online.  I’ve done it off and on for years, and I need to stress that the reason I’m no longer doing sorcery for hire has nothing to do with my feelings about that as a legitimate thing.

If you’re good at something, never do it for free.  Exchange is important.  In fact, it’s part of the process of taking on a client’s issues and doing work to address them in the client’s place.  Hoodoo and folk witchcraft, in particular, have long traditions doing exactly this.  But spiritual work for clients is present in just about every spiritual system on earth.

Who would I recommend if someone came to me looking for a good practitioner?  Here are a few people I like, who I think do a good job for clients.  Just because I think this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t proceed with caution no matter who you employ.  But over the years you get to know who is and who isn’t real.

So this is my top six (in no particular order or ranking):

• Brother Ash.  (It’s been a while since he’s updated his website and he may be on a hiatus, but he knows his business.)  https://crossroadsorcery.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html
• Dr. Christos Kioni.  (Don’t be put off by his marketing. He’s a real old-time worker and someone from whom I’ve learned a lot.) https://www.drkioni.com/
• My Secret Hoodoo (Runs a very traditional conjure practice and shows that he knows what he’s talking about.) https://mysecrethoodoo.blogspot.com/
• Brujo Negro (A Mexican Brujo par excellence and author of the infamous Voodoo Sorcery Grimoire.) https://www.brujonegrobrujeria.com
• Brother Moloch (A Studio Arcanis veteran and long-time practitioner-teacher in the areas of sorcery, evocation, modern grimoires, and an initiated Houngan Asogwe in Haitian Vodu.  He’s also a great guy, but he doesn’t mince words.)  https://www.molochsorcery.com/
• Sorcerous Endeavors (Chris is also a long-time Studio Arcanis member, a fellow moderator there, and a very personable and intelligent practitioner.  I’ve referred many clients to him over the years.)  https://www.sorcerousendeavors.com/

So these are the people I’d send you to, depending on what your issue happened to be.  I don’t know what most of them are up to right now.  Some may be on hiatus or may have shut their practices down because of Covid.  But I want to post this now, given that a lot of people who worked with me in the past wanted to know where to go when I shut Black Snake Conjure down.

S+A

A New Start

Well, here we are again . . . 

This is undeniably a time of radical change.  Everyone feels upside-down to some extent, whether from pandemic death and fallout, riots, or just deep political polarization.  And magical people are not exempt.  In fact, occultists might be extra-susceptible to sweeping upheaval.  Like artists, we need time and space to do our work.  We need some way to make a living.  And we need to “find the others” to some extent so that we feel less alone.  Social instability puts all these in jeopardy.

To this end, I’ve shut all my other esoteric and magical blogs down.  This will be the only place, other than on Studio Arcanis, that I write publicly about the occult and my explorations in it.  I just don’t have the time and energy to do much more.  That includes my professional sorcery-for-hire website, a business I ended about a year ago with no plans to return to it in the near future. 

So this blog isn’t about those things.  I want it to be more personal than my other magical websites have been.  I want to talk about what I’m working on and interested in instead of writing to an audience of potential clients.  This means I’m going to address things that my readers care about less and things I care about more. 

Right now, that means continuing to scry the Enochian Aethyrs, working with Michael Bertiaux’s Voudon Gnostic Workbook, Brujo Negro’s Voodoo Sorcery Grimoire, The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses edited by Peterson, the Dream Discourses of Eckankar, and various mantras that go with my practice of Ashtanga yoga.  In a folk magical way, I’m working with Saint Cajetan and Saint Expedite.  So I’ve got a lot on my plate.

Most people who read this and know me already are aware that I’ve practiced and promoted Geoff Gray-Cobb’s fantastic Miracle of New Avatar Power and The Mystic Grimoire of Mighty Spells and Rituals (written under his pen name, “Frater Malak”).  I’ll probably be writing about those as well and doing some book reviews (as I read far and wide in the areas of magic and the occult).

For those who don’t know me: hello.  I’ve been doing this stuff for about 30 years.  I’m an ordained priest of a controversial Egyptian deity (something I won’t be talking about here), a second-year chela of Eckankar, and a practitioner of yoga, Vipassana meditation, grimoire magic, and folk craft that looks a lot like hoodoo. 

I hope you find something of interest on this blog as I develop it with all new posts.  Thanks for reading.

S+A