Book Discussion Your magic path described by books; how books connect to the mind

[AlfrunGrima]

If you oversee your magical path/career/life in chronically order and find matching books, which books and in which order would that be? Which book marks which period? Which book was a gamechanger, which book just a confirmation what you already knew and experienced? And which books embodied everything you are not? Which non-occult books influenced your path too? Or to say in another way: describe you magical path in books and foremost tell something about the why.

I had this conversation more often in the past and as a result I started to read other occult books, than I normally would do. I found it enormously interesting to discover how books are connected to the human mind, how they help to shape ideas or even break down other (older) ideas in the human mind.

(I hope I selected the right prefix for this)

 

[MorganBlack]

Man, magicians and our books. Good topic, AlfrunGrima.

Someone said magic is a broken tradition. I agree and we all have to reweave it from the threads and hints communicated in these eldritch books of lore and spells.

Well, our starting conditions in life influences our trajectory often more than we wish. I almost have the Champions TTRPG Perk "Unusual Backstory. I grew up in a very open-minded secular-scientific household with nice parents. Officially Unitarian Universalist with a Zen Buddhist practice as a teen.The Unitarian Church was a great place to be. A member of a local seminal witchcraft coven was a member as well. I attended a seance he orchestrated one Halloween there when I was 11 or so. We had a astrology group that met at my house. I was also a teen member of the Jung Society.

So as Gen-X and already established in my practice by age 25 before the internet took over. So there was just not that much material out there of interest to me, but here are some major themes-in-books.

I was not interested in magic and sorcery for spirituality or a replacement religion. I already had Zen, and some liberal culture ethics. I was a kid and for me this OTHER stuff was rock-and-roll.

Age 8. Some mass market 1970's witchcraft book whose title I wish I could recall, but containing a ritual from the Grimoirium Verum . I checked it out from my magnet school grade-school library. This the last bit of the Weird 1970's in the U.S. before the Religious Right swept through and surgically removed all these fun artifacts, in an effort to protect gullible minds like mine.

Age 12. Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft. From the local mall. Really, that was it. The right feeling. It was all there.

Age 18 - After high school I was backpacking through the UK and picked up what at the time was cutting edge Chaos Magic while at the Sorcerer's Apprentice in Leeds.

Age 19. I was at a party talking about magic and someone I did not know gave me a 1957 paperback of Idries Shah's The Secret Lore of Magic. That cemented it and I began cobbling together my own goetia with the Grimoirium Verum, Red Dragon, and others of the blue books.

Age 20-25. Went down the Chaos Magic / Robert Anton Wilson Operation Mind-Fuck a bit too far, ended up in the OTO. Got attacked by one of the demons which at that point I did not really believe in. Recognized the modern magic systems had nothing useful to say about Goetia. Met a Houngan and entered the world of Vodou and their way of dealing with the greater animist universe. Never looked back, even while I approve of the training systems.

Much later I read Jake Stratton-Kent's excellent work, and said well, ah, I can shift out of this more Christian flavored system a bit. I had already reformulated my cosmo-conception into a sort of Daimonic NeoPlatonic working meta-myth.

 

[AlfrunGrima]

Wow, I see a lot of interesting books and an very special route through your magical life! I am with you that I didn't need my magic to fill in the blanks of religion. Because for me there were no blanks and there was no guilt. I was satisfied with what I had in my religious life, I only wanted to explore magical life. Indeed a kind af rock and roll. I am from '81 and when I started to discovering there was almost no internet. We had that on the telephone line and it was way to expensive to let the little girl playing with that. At that time I even didn't understand how to work with a computer and I really had to learn that in high school. I always read a lot, so it was quite natural for me to dwell in bookstores right from the moment I was in high school.

 

[MorganBlack]

I am with you that I didn't need my magic to fill in the blanks of religion. Because for me there were no blanks and there was no guilt. I was satisfied with what I had in my religious life, I only wanted to explore magical life.

That's so refreshing, AlfrunGrima! Not having religious trauma growing up helps me be pretty ecumenical as well. I can respect people in any mythic framework, and I feel we should judge a religion by it's butterflies and not it's caterpillars.

As a mixed ethnic kid of mixed ethnic parents in Texas I was raised to be very ecumenical. At the Unitarian church we took field trips to other churches, temples, and synagogues. All done with no judgement. Unitarianism is very Sufic and sees the light of God as shining through all religions even if they have different words.

I also have Mexican Catholic grandparents on one side, and Jewish grandparents on the other. It would never occur to me to use mythology to pit them against each other. It just seems so stupid and bleak.

I'm currently reading Peter Grey's 'Lucifer: Praxis' which while I think it pretty great I can't escape the feeling it's mostly for people whose ancestors had to suffer through the European hellscape of history, the Dutch, British and Spanish Empires, the Nazis, the resource wars, the use of ritual to cement power (thinking of the British Crown pageantry).

Occultish folks in the States usually have some form Protestant Christo-trauma, usually from some mega-Church nasty fundamentalist sect. Much of their sourpuss qualities comes from The Niagara Bible Conferences from the 1800's , which was American oligarchs trying to make a slave religion for white people, and interjected a whole slew of bad attitudes, among them, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Black. It was a lot for them to get over, and they as still haunted by it. Vile stuff.

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My girlfriend is from Dallas and was raised Southern Baptist. The Christo-trauma is a real thing in her psychology. I am introducing her to the better aspects of Catholic Mysticism. The New Age pagan route is not working so well, so I think maybe more of soft approach to overwrite it with the legit beautiful mystical practices there might help. She was never going to mythologize science and go UFO cult, thank goodness.

As the mixed ethnicity kids of mixed ethnicity parents in Texas and California, I just don't have the same grievances as Grey does against the Catholic Church. Mexican Catholicism is so different from pray-pay-obey Irish Catholicism as to be almost a separate religion. Among the Native American tribes of Mexico it was just accepted you adopted the war god of the people who defeated you. Like, whelp, our war god obviously sucks. Gonna call this other guy. And we changed the Church as much as they changed us. Not sure what to call that.

Maybe just taking the good with the bad, and not trying to fit all of it into one totalizing , low-level, poltical grudge fest mythology? Dare I say it? But in a high-level view that is more actually polytheist.