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Author Edits by Joseph H. Pererson, who is he?

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AlfrunGrima

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There are grimoires (like Grimorium Verum) edited/ annotated by Joseph H. Peterson before they went to publish, some books published by Llewellin. What kind of figure/person is he? Was he a magician or more a history researcher? Is there somebody who can shine a light on this person and tell more?

(I used the prefix Autor for this post, but that is not completely fitting because he was an editor)
 

AlfrunGrima

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I take it google was broken at the time of this question ?
I hoped for more insights than only google could give. The occult world is not a big world/community...... And I never have thought to look at podcasts. I am online in this forum, but not so on the internet in general. Still have to find my way.

Thank you for your somewhat unfriendly answer.
 

Yazata

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The cool thing about Peterson is, as I said, he gives basically the full translations of all the grimoires he himself has transcribed from Latin into English for free on his website. To support his work you can always buy one of his books or make a donation via PayPal on his site.
 

AlfrunGrima

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The cool thing about Peterson is, as I said, he gives basically the full translations of all the grimoires he himself has transcribed from Latin into English for free on his website. To support his work you can always buy one of his books or make a donation via PayPal on his site.
Yes, it is really great that makes those translation! I certainly will make a donation, it is hard work and needs to be appreciated.
 

MorganBlack

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While he is not a practitioner we owe a lot to Peterson.

Most people now don’t realize that for the 20th century all this magic stuff was considered trash, least in the English speaking world. It was almost impossible almost to find any good primary texts, and everyone was working from very sparse source material. I had Idries Shah's 1957 book The Secret Lore of Magic that a stranger gave me at a party, Waite, and Crowley's rippoff of Mathers to work from, and I made it work.

Then Peterson comes out with the Lesser Key in 2001, the Grimorium Verum, Heptameron, Arbatel, all straight from the best manuscripts, footnotes, corrected names, the works. And if I recall, The Fourth Book, Sworn Book, 6 & 7 Books of Moses , all hitting between 2000 and 2010 or 2011, every one sourced from the old manuscripts from libraries around the world, footnotes, parallel Latin/English, the whole deal.

Look at just the massive influence of just one book alone, Reginald Scott's The Discoverie of Witchcraft , which people used as a grimiore. Even the British Cunning Men and Women had to collect scraps. Peterson is a one man Cambrian explosion of manuscripts. They were all put to good use by magicians.
 

Faria

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Long ago he ran a website called Avesta, focused on the Pharsi religion. After some time he published the Esotericarchives as a CD-Rom with a website, probably the best resource for occult literature online. I have never spoken to him, but I understand that he is still invested in the Zoroastrian material and is publishing the occult as a personal interest. He is known for reliable representations of source material with relevant commentary on their contents.
 

beardedeldridge

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Like others have said, I’ve never met him.

He’s a Zoroastrian who is one of the main reasons, directly and indirectly, for the revival of magic that we are currently enjoying. Of his work, his own biases don’t seem to affect the finished product and the way he explains things in interviews as obviously as most authors/practitioners. While making a living is most assuredly important to him, his main driving goal seems to be the finding, translating, and disseminating of these texts.

-Eld
 

Faria

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While he is not a practitioner we owe a lot to Peterson....

Most people now don’t realize that for the 20th century all this magic stuff was considered trash...

Peterson is a one man Cambrian explosion of manuscripts.

Younger people have no idea what it was like when there was no internet and no bookstores would carry occult titles. There was a whole class of secret literature that you got through word of mouth. And if by chance you did find an occult store, 90% of the time it was Hoodoo and Wicca, and the legit Solomonic materials were invisible. And you would likely be surrounded by people who would flip the royal heck out if they so much as saw a paperback on Chakras, much less a grimoire.

Browse the categories of Esotericarchives... no store had any of that, and the books they did carry wouldn't even reveal the existence of many of the titles hosted there.

There were a couple of chopped up versions of Lemegeton or the Grimoirium Verum, but the original unCrowleyfied and unWiccafied version of that stuff was rare. Esotericarchives came out almost as soon as decent quality personal web pages did, and has been there ever since. It transformed what was formerly something cults and weirdos could hoard and hold against people (who couldn't otherwise access the source literature) into documents anybody could read. And if you wanted more detail, it was super cheap for the CD compared to any amount of hardcopy. It brought the closely guarded secrets of the occult into public discussion.
 

MorganBlack

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the original unCrowleyfied and unWiccafied version of that stuff was rare
Right right!

This is probably veering off topic only slightly, but 19th-20th century magical revival has needed some serious unpacking for a while. Not to kill it off, or dismiss it as useless, but to re-balance better where we put things.

The books of brujeria in the bontanicas of the American SW were also pastiches. Migene Gonzalez-Wippler's 6th and 7th Books of Moses was pretty late and about the best then you could get, and it was terrible. And yes, people made it work, but Peterson's version is so many lightyears ahead. And only in the past few years did we get good translation of the Faustian texts that are included therein.

Not to make books supreme, but Magic is a broken tradition and until there is a generational transmission, if there ever was one, then the written texts and other artifacts, along with word of mouth, will continue to be the way the tradition is communicated.

We have so many better primary texts that earlier folk could only have have dreamed of. We didn't get a good translation of The Greek Magical Papyri by Betz until 1986(!!).

The effect have been amazing. Look at the better (imho) Hermetic revival ramping up right now. Or the movement of what I think of as Witchcraft 2.0.

Someone one said Neopagan Witchcraft was the bootloader to get to real witchcraft. Call it Witchcraft 2.0. Yes, people made it work, but to act like the Theosophy-GD-Crowely-Gardner-Wicca-NeoPaganism-Paganism, which is a very specific pipeline, is the end story is absurd.
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Pardon. Typo fix. ... The Greek Magical Papyri by Betz until 1996(!!).
 
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cormundum

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Not to make books supreme, but Magic is a broken tradition and until there is a generational transmission, if there ever was one, then the written texts and other artifacts, along with word of mouth, will continue to be the way the tradition is communicated.

We have so many better primary texts that earlier folk could only have have dreamed of. We didn't get a good translation of The Greek Magical Papyri by Betz until 1986(!!).

The effect have been amazing. Look at the better (imho) Hermetic revival ramping up right now. Or the movement of what I think of as Witchcraft 2.0.

You hit it on the nose right there. Personally I think the magickal tradition is by nature fragmented, since it is a way of trying to make sense of things that are (to a certain degree, anyway) nonsensical when we follow the Aristotelian/Newtonian paradigm for how the world works. Astrology per example is complete bullshit when you approach it from that view (Thomas Aquinas' gravitational theories get close, but no cigar); but if you learn more about modern science and the whole quantum physics paradigm with the whole particle/wave thing and the constant vibratory and moving state of the smallest particles of matter, the stars communicating some sort of invisible influence or energy that changes the way a certain person is constituted makes perfect sense.

When you extrapolate that to magickal operations broadly speaking, the whole system can kinda work as an expression of Natural Laws that we just don't understand yet.

What I'm hoping is that the current magickal/Hermetic revolution can exploit these new ways of looking at things and be able to explain it in a cohesive, nonsense and jargon free way so we can develop these technologies for more advanced use.
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Got kinda lost in my own meandering there.

It is broken by nature because of the lack of consistent records kept, and the fact that most of what is left over are exclusively practical manuals, at best. At worst everything written is just conjecture or else fantasy.

All modern magick reaching back to some mythical past (whether Templars, Freemasons, Priests of Osiris/Isis/Djehuti or whatever) is another hobbling factor. When magicians can be honest that we're all FAFOing and just trying not to die or harm those close to us as part of trying to get rich or find the perfect spouse or whatever the goal is, the magickal tradition might be able to approach some degree of wholeness. When it gets to that point, magick will stop being about books and it will come to the place of being a respectable practice and science. In the meanwhile we have to dust off the old books and study diligently and experiment with the old techniques and put those theories — all of 'em — to the test, then either initiate a few enlightened people into our practice privately, or write yet more books about it for the next generations to have a leg up on us.
 
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