My favorite piece of egregious astrobabble, of course, is from Hair:

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars;
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars.

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius …

Because, of course, the Moon passes through the seventh house daily, and if you don’t say which aspect you mean by “aligns with,” then Mars (being the faster planet) will align with Jupiter around one day in ten (educated guess, all details not worked out, depends on orbs, etc.). The age of Aquarius is about 130 years from now (depending on just how you define it), and there are reasons to think it isn’t going to be very pretty, either; the rulership will pass from Jupiter to Saturn, after all.

I just hit another one. After all these years, I am finally reading Lammas Night by Katherine Kurtz. So far, so good: I already knew she was a top-flight story-teller, and one who usually doesn’t fumble the occult matters. However, on p. 57 of the Ballantine paperback edition (I have the 10th printing), we find Graham talking horoscopes with Prince William. First, he says that the Prince and his twin were born at “around” 3:00 am, on 1905-07-12. A bit later, he says that the subtle differences between William’s and John’s aspects based on less than an hour’s difference are interesting. OK, sometimes they are (more because houses may shift than anything else); but a little further down, we have “Both your Sun and your ascendant are in the same degree of Cancer…” At that latitude, the Sun rises early near the Solstice, but it would have been 3:52 before the Sun and the ascendant were in the same degree (which is an astro-nerdy way of saying “sunrise”).

It’s not as awful as I was thinking when I started writing this; I’m glad I checked. I still don’t get why make it almost right.

Historically, there was a Prince John born that day at the Royal Family’s estate at Sandringham, and, as mentioned, Prince John did die young (in 1919); but in reality, he had no twin. This is a neat way for Kurtz to bring in a Royal without historical contradictions or Windsor ire.

Here’s the wrecktified horoscope:
One very cool thing about this particular chart is that a mid-Cancer ascendant is close to that of the Thema Mundi.

As I read, I will see how true “William” is to this borrowed horoscope. He’s already showed tendencies consistent with having his Mars and Moon in Scorpio and the 5th house.

I don’t know if I have seen anyone do this with a fictional character before. Should be interesting. Wonder what she made of his Mercury in a different sign and house from Sol, but squared by Mars? Or the empty 4th and 10th houses, consistent with the short and private life of the real Prince? Hmmm… or that pesky Saturn in the 9th house, which I share? How many religions and philosophies have I set up and torn down now?

There’s no planet there to serve the same purpose: Saturn is too far West of midheaven, so I think the author just started to say one thing, wrote more about something else, and never went back to make it make sense.

[I am now on page 295 out of 438, and the suspense is killing me, so excuse me while I read myself to sleep!]
I finished the book about five days ago. Just to be clear, I think it’s a crafty page-turner that every magician would want to read. It makes me more interested than ever to look into The Magical Battle of Britain for some of the real background. I did not find anything else to nit-pick on.

Of course, you have to suspend disbelief on the whole Fraser-Murray-Graves sacrificial king mythos, as well as the strong version of the Witch Cult hypothesis, in order to let this book work its magic. Well, is that so hard, really? It’s a great mythos, it doesn’t have to line up with history. If you insist on that, the Archons are going to bite your head off and make you reincarnate without it. Or perhaps it’s a vital organ they’ll take …

This book was so good, I almost picked up The Adept and started reading that series again.

But, back to “not reading fiction” for a while. Until the next exception.

While I’m waiting to finish something else from my to-be-reviewed pile, I thought I would emulate Polyphanes and write about the contents of my “well-thumbed pile,” my books of frequent resort. Actually, most of these books are not in a pile any more: they are in a snake-print tote bag ready to be moved from room to room or off to my home-away at Books, Beans, and Candles (yes, that’s a plug; if you visit Birmingham, you mustn’t miss it). In no particular order:

• Nigel Jackson, Celestial Magic: Principles And Practices of the Talismanic Art (Cappall Bann, 2003). This little book is full of inspiration and information. There are practical chapters on the Lunar Mansions and the Behenian stars, philosophical chapters like “Hermetic Daimonology,” and ritual and devotional material of great maturity and appeal. Nigel Jackson is best known as a fine talismanic artist, but after working with this book, I also see he is one of the few people alive who really, deeply understand this most elegant and profound magical art.
• Stephen Skinner, The Complete Magician’s Tables. I have all of the major books on correspondences; I have not opened any of the others since I started working with Skinner. The endnotes are worth the price of the book. You might find specifics to question, but you won’t find a better encyclopedia of correspondences overall.
• Carroll “Poke” Runyon (Fr. Thabion, OTA), The Book of Solomon’s Magick. Not surprising, since this is the system I’m working in, primarily; but there’s a lot in here that should interest non-OTA magi as well. You definitely want to look at this if you are preparing to work the Goetia: it might save you some false starts, or even your sanity. Even though the Goetia is how Frater Thabion made his bones, magically, this book is a lot more than just a Goetic how-to.
• John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (trans. & ed.s) The Complete Picatrix. This grandmother of all grimoires, likely one of the most-frequently banned books in history, was not available in anything like a competent and complete edition in English until these two published their translation, based on the Pingree Latin critical edition. It’s still hard to follow in places; it contains a significant number of seriously nasty workings; but it is also the source of a lot of what we know about the root tradition of celestial magic.
• Eric Purdue’s Three Books Of Occult Philosophy Book One: A Modern Translation. The first competent English translation of Agrippa, with notes based on the new Latin critical edition, identifying Agrippa’s sources practically to the letter. Books 2 and 3 are expected out this summer! The astrological references will finally be sorted out correctly!
• Patricia Costello, The Weiser Concise Guide to Practical Astrology. Still the best one-stop small astrology reference, but getting a bit less useful as my study ripens. I also agree with Polyphanes’s recommendation of Robert Hand’s Horoscope Symbols for background on the planets, signs, houses, and aspects (I see it has been two years since I bought the Hand book; honestly, I thought it was three — if not seven).
• Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopedia. I only have the first paperback edition of this classic. From what I have heard, I really need to get the most recent one (which is what I have linked to). In the meantime, this has enough about gematria to be getting on with, including the full text of Sepher Sephiroth as an appendix so I don’t have to carry that around.
• Fr. Thabion recommended LMD‘s The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford
  . It’s introductory, yes, but very good.
• A tarot deck. Of course. Currently, it’s my old Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the lingua franca of Tarot. Not in case of a sudden need for divination, generally, but more for reference and contemplation.
• Two decks of index cards, plus a supply of blanks: these are my quick reference flash cards for astrology and the Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet correspondences.
• A new acquisition, Adam McLean‘s Study Course on Alchemical Symbolism. I divined a while ago that I was feeding myself too wordy a diet, and needed to add some visual training. This is a start on that. A little pricey, but will likely prove a good investment (a tip of the hood to Frater Osiris for recommending it).
• A GD pamphlet with the Westcott Sepher Yetzirah. Duh.
• Speaking of William Wynn Westcott (the other WWW), I like his Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtues a lot, too. It’s been in the bag before.
• The Way of Hermes: New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius because I’m supposed to like that sort of thing and the complete works of Plato don’t fit in the bag. No, really, it’s an awesome piece of wisdom literature, and this is the actually-readable translation.

This is not everything I’m reading (or dipping into) by a long shot. Plus, I keep getting more recommendations from well-meaning people who care more about my spiritual journey than about my finances; thanks to all such lovely people.

Bonus tidbit: are Mages¹ born or made? It takes years of hard work to become a Mage, which only those born to it will complete. If they don’t die of eyestrain from all the reading…

Cover of The Everyday Psychic

Harrison is the author of The Herbal Alchemist’s Handbook, already reviewed quite favorably here. She has put in twenty or more years on the arcane arts, and is clearly someone deserving of our attention.

This book aims at a wider audience than one with a more specifically magical bent. It compares favorably with other books in this genre, of which my favorite has been You Are Psychic!: The Free Soul Method, by Pete A. Sanders, Jr. Ophiel also wrote The Art and Practice of Clairvoyance, which I should definitely have a look at someday. Harrison’s book is vastly easier reading than the “Swami Panchadasi” opus I reviewed two years ago; that one has its own charms, as noted.

The exercises in the present book are practical and relatively simple. They are not as detailed (and dare I say pedantic) as Bardon’s in Initiation into Hermetics, but then, we need only one of Bardon, thank you! They range from simple meditations and pathworkings to a reprise of the old AMORC dark-mirror scrying exercise.

There is a nice division of types of psychic functioning, very well-done, matching and extending the terms I use.

We’re going to have to forgive the author’s scientifically-naïve attempts in the beginning of the book to ground psychic functioning in the realm of electromagnetic phenomena; the Maxwellian EM field does not exhibit the necessary characteristics of memory or non-locality to explain Ψ. I go into more detail on some topics related to this in my recent essay, The Reënchantment Project. There is an interface between Ψ and the EM field, but no one has nailed down exactly how it works yet.

In short, this is a very competent work on this important topic, and it will be especially useful to anyone who is wanting to start their esoteric work by turning up their Ψ receptors.

Copyright 2012 () Freeman Presson, all rights reserved

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. (Werner Heisenberg, as quoted in The New York Times Book Review of 8 March 1992)

This is a nicely-made, 6″x9″ paperback with a soothing, New-Age-friendly sky blue cover bearing a picture of assorted tumbled stones and an attractively-clouded crystal on the cover. Unlike some books on stones I could mention, this one will not plunge the reader into a bunch of malarkey about how the markings on the crystal indicate that it contains the history of Lemuria. It also benefits from competent copy-editing.

The first quarter of the book contains an extended essay by Stuart Weinberg on “Crystals and the New Age.” Most of this is taken up with the commonly-known history of some selected figures from Theosophy and Spiritism, forerunners of what we commonly call the New Age, with some material that sites crystal lore within that tradition and gives suggestions for further reading. Skimming this part turned up nothing to raise suspicions or hackles; if this interests you, it will be worth a read (actually, he does uncritically credit Blavatsky’s “Tibetan Masters,” apparently unaware of K. Paul Johnson’s 1994 book, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge.)

Isidore Kozminsky’s 1922 classic takes up the rest of the book. This is one of those wonderful, expansive books of lore that meanders here and there, connecting this to that and that to everything, in a delightfully Hermetic fashion. Stones are traced from the breastplate of the Aaronic priesthood, through many other traditions. After the general narrative, whose end made me wistful, there is an extensive section of stone-by-stone specifics. Fortunately, beyond the factual tabulation for each stone, quite useful in itself, there is more delightful and well-informed narrative.

I once asked if there was a good crystal encyclopedia without all the fluffy BS (and have since seen one or two): this is the book someone should have pointed me to at that time.

Put this on your bookshelf next to Book I of Agrippa and a good magical herbal, and you’ll have enough on natural magic to be getting on with. Even if you already have your own weight in such books, you should indulge here.

For anyone unfamiliar with the history, Enochian (also known as Angelic) is a magical system containing an alphabet and a complete and consistent language (more or less so, depending on who you talk to), based on channeled material received by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer, with his scryer, Edward Kelly. We have Dee’s journals containing the record of all his experiments because the philologist Méric Casaubon published them in the hopes of destroying Dee’s credibility and damaging the whole Hermetic project, just as his father, Isaac, had done by proving that the Greek original of the Corpus Hermeticum from which Ficino had made his famous translation was not pre-Christian, thereby shoving Hermes Trismegistus off the pedestal he had begun to occupy in the Catholic Church. Much later, we found the pre-Christian sources of the Corpus, so the father’s attempt eventually met a similar fate to the son’s.

This volume (nicely bound and printed on very good, unusually white paper) contains Liber LXXXIV vel Chanokh (Enoch), and The Vision and the Voice, which is Crowley’s excellent (and occasionally harrowing) magical record of working his way through the thirty Aethyrs of Enochian. This last is a fine text for scaring away people who probably don’t belong here, and making those who stay more enthusiastic. Its production values are outstanding; the only place it falls down is that the format, a little under 6×9, makes some of the diagrams hard to read. If you are planning to copy tables, etc., you will want your 4x magnifier at hand.

Enochian is rather en vogue recently, although it requires a serious commitment to pursue (Poke Runyon says it’s like jacking up your magical worldview and installing an Enochian foundation). It is important to know about, though, even if nary an “Ol sonuf vaoresaji …” ever escapes your lips.

DuQuette provides a brief introduction to the present volume, and reprints his introduction to the 1992 Magickal Childe edition of Dee’s journals. In the introduction, he recommends some other books and authors to study (naturally, just like every other branch of ceremonial magic, Enochian can bog you down for centuries just reading about it if you’re not selective). It looks like this book, DuQuette’s Enochian Vision Magick, and perhaps one of the editions of Dee’s journals (of which Skinner’s is reputedly best) would be a good start.

If you’re a student of the Western Esoteric Tradition, and especially if you don’t have another copy of The Vision and the Voice in your library, then you should have this. Not only that, at some point you should consider actually reading it!

The legend or memory of Atlantis tugs at our spirits. It was safely forgotten: Plato’s hints dismissed as allegory, skeptics claiming a lack of hard evidence. Now, they are beginning to seem like the last generation of geologists who harrumphed at plate tectonics. Sure, the edges of the major continents fit together like so many puzzle pieces, but that was “coincidence,” or the Creator having a little fun on a long-ago Monday morning. Now, the question is, what actually happens when the glaciers melt and sea level rises by 125 feet or more world-wide? That happened, a few minutes ago on the geological timeline …

Picking up the thread of the Atlantis mystery, Elizabeth Carreker-Downs is weaving a story of what happens when that buried past strains at its bonds and begins to break free. Her protagonist, Brenna, is a psychic detective and owner of a metaphysical shop. Her very realistic mix of talents and fears make her a very sympathetic character, and the events of this novel open broad vistas into a might-have-been past, a past of glorious spiritual attainment, which inevitably, some tainted with greed and ambition.

This is the classic legend of Atlantis brought into today’s esoteric world. Long ago, Brenna was reprieved from her tragic past life, but now it’s catching up again. She’s pulled into this latest chapter of the ancient saga because of her psychic skills, but they are a weakness as well as a strength, and soon she will need more. That’s it, you get no spoilers.

There are only two downsides to this book, as noted by Lilith: it ends too suddenly, making one wish the next book were at hand; and there were too many punctuation and editing errors. But, since I am still itching to start the next volume several days after finishing this one, I’m safe in recommending that you ignore that and get on with it.

Dolphin Gate is available in a Kindle edition from Amazon, or in paperback from Lulu.

My copy was labeled “uncorrected proof.” Repeat readers know how I am about typos and other errors in published books (hint: fiendish). I didn’t see ONE; I don’t think I’m slipping, either; I think the book was professionally edited (editing credits go to Tracy DeVore and Thaddeus Sexton).

“Ancient Sorceries” by Algernon Blackwood is framed as a detective story, but it is really a long and dream-like paranormal tale being told as a wrap-up through conversations with John Silence. The other stories are full of the more usual fast-paced action and sudden horror one wants from this genre.

I found eight of the stories solid and enjoyable. One of them was more of a vignette that really didn’t take off properly, but since this is very much a matter of taste, and one such out of nine is not likely, taken alone, to make anyone decide against the book, I will refrain from naming it and let the astute reader agree with me, or not.

The book is generously illustrated with line drawings by Bob Freeman, the current contemporary champion of the genre. His Landon “My Creator’s Alter Ego” Connors occult detective character acts as psychopomp, and each story is fronted with an appropriate piece of art. You can amuse yourself picking out sources for symbolism and interesting details in the art (such as recognizing a T-shirt with your home state’s flag partially covered by a jacket, or a familiar occult sigil, or a familiar fake sigil). The cover art by itself makes the book a treasure. Look closely: is the building on the front cover (shown on the right above) “real,” or is it something from the Olam Yetzirah? A Hermetic Memory Palace, perhaps? The Astral Temple of a very learned and visually talented Mage? Dream on …

You can “buy it for one click”¹ on Amazon.

By 1917, when the Cottingley Fairies story broke, and got Conan Doyle all excited, it was clear that the Fae had already been trivialized in the modern imagination. Out of all the objections to the charming pictures of butterfly-like flower fairies, there were none of the form: “That’s not like the Fae Queen that kidnapped my great-uncle Ned,” or “I don’t believe Thomas the Rhymer met anything like that.”

I’ve quite given up yelling and breaking things over such fluffy nonsense, but had I the wit and talent of Clint Marsh, I could have had great fun writing a book that highlights this discrepancy by retelling the advice and recounting the adventures of one Reginald Bakeley, English esquire and fairy-hunter extraordinaire. Especially since I could keep up the tone of the rural English sporting press throughout, and only toward the end lapse into such a tour de force of disingenuous self-parody as to leave my reader quite gasping for breath and wishing there were a servant, just briefly, so one could just “ring for tea” and not have to put the book down.

For, you see, I should have absolutely filled my book to the rim with extracts from real faery-lore, in the process of explaining how to eliminate them or at least defend against them. Oh, and I might have one chapter where it sounds like I am going soft on the sweet little flower-fairies of the Cottingley kind, only to finish up with a recipe worthy of al-Majitri or the Greek Magical Papyri for an alligation of flower-fae.

I would also have tried not to wink at my reader too broadly, except perhaps here and there as I suggested such things as hiring the local lodge of Freemasons, or failing that, good respectable British Druids, to help with moving a ley line.

Oh, I could have done all that, perhaps; yet I don’t think I’d have quite risen to the roof of risibility it took to package the book with a rubber chicken on a keyring.

But, no, I didn’t do it, and perhaps could not have; but that is moot, since Clint Marsh and his döppelganger Reginald Bakeley have decisively, thunderously, and hilariously beaten me to it.

It’s $14.95, about the price of two fingers of the McCalla in a private-club bar, should there be a reason to compare it with the way I celebrated my 40th birthday. And it is much cheaper than recreating the way I celebrated my 59th, since most of you poor clucks (at least the men) would have to have paid for what I got for free.

Buy the book; whiskey and sex will just get you into trouble.