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.
