Please Don’t Read Aloud; Cthulhu Occultism Part 5: Ritual and Magic in Lovecraft

A missionary depiction of native peoples.

Much of the ‘horror’ in Lovecraft rather depends on being a prig, and on the prurience of prigs. Brought up in a household of late-nineteenth century ‘genteel’ women, along with his equally antique Grandfather, Lovecraft took up the language of anthropological popularization and Christian-missionary potboilers (get it?). When he wanted to frighten with a cult ritual he described it as ‘unspeakable’ or ‘abhorrent’. These were often literary code-words for sexually embarrassing details, or even simply for the terrible moral shock of realizing that other people worshipped gods that were not one’s own.

However, this has the happy effect of leading readers of Lovecraft to fill in the blanks with our own imaginations. In this the Victorian mind had no shortage of scandalous material. Modern writers, in attempting to capture HPL’s flavor, have occasionally resorted to graphic depiction. It is seldom as effective as Lovecraft’s indefinite adjectives. However the modern bar for ‘shocking’ is set so high in comparison to HPL’s day that his writing style describes weird events in a way that is, to moderns, more intriguing than repulsive. Those of us who have found what society forbids to often be where the good lies may be actively drawn to an effort to figure out just what the Yuggoth he was beating around the bush about.

Once again, I want to go back to Lovecrafts’ stories. While I will finally arrive at discussing modern attempts at real occultism in the Mythos mental setting I want to begin by detailing the original material. I’m afraid that’s how this giant series happened – I want to review modern HPL occultism, but need to get the context straight for the reader and, of course, for myself.

Lovecraft never ‘studied’ the occult, certainly never practiced, but it is plain that he read various popular books on the subject. The list seems to include The Witch-cult In Western Europe by Margaret Murray; The Book of Ceremonial Magic, By AE Waite (a surname Lovecraft included in his writing, good Anglo-American thing that it is); The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, by Scott Elliott, and various other Theosophical material. The Book of Dzyan, Madame Blavatsky’s own fake pre-human scripture, becomes one of the madness-inducing forbidden books of the Cthulhu Mythos – one of the few direct lifts from

A popular Solomonic talisman

real-world occultism. Interestingly Lovecraft never seems to have gotten the names of the classic European grimoires into his head. One never reads of the Clavicles of Solomon, or of dreaded Honorius’ forbidden book.

The details of ritual magic were not as easy to locate in HPL’s time as they are today and, unlike cult activity, they were not the regular topic of newspaper articles. Lovecraft had no interest in occultism as such, and never made the effort to locate the obscure materials. On the other hand he considered himself an ‘Antiquarian’, and anything in suggestive Latin caught his eye. He plainly did read the accounts of the witch trials and various witch-hunters’ manuals, such as Saducismus Triumphatus and Daemonolatreia, appear in his mixtures of real and fictional scholarship. From these he clearly gathered ideas such as intercourse with monstrous devils, pacts with demons, and the witch’s familiar. His personal image of magic was also shaped by the Arabian Nights and, of course, by his own reading in the previous generation of gothic writers, such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. If HPL has a source for western ceremonial magic I think it is mainly in his imitation of that generation, several of whom had personal contact with the Golden Dawn.

Lovecraft’s ritual depictions do owe more to sensational press and popular literature than to occult teachings. For instance we never see examples of the sort of basic spellcraft that is the majority of the working mage’s art. HPL was concerned with cosmic things. Opening gates between dimensions, ancient Pagan cults, commerce with monsters – these interested him; love-spells, not so much.

 

Books of sorcery confiscated in modern Iran

Let us look at some traditional occult intentions and methods in HPL’s stories.

• Summoning, and Illicit Worship

The central occult gimmick of Mythos stories is the congress between humans and various non-human species. This is certainly the idea that has most directly influenced modern occultism, but HPL’s direct depictions of it are sketchy at best.

In Lovecraft’s writing the beings summoned by sorcerers are not, for the most part, ‘spirits’. They are not (generally) immaterial beings forming vaguely-perceptible bodies out of smoke or wind or fire. Much more commonly they are material beings dwelling secretly on the Earth, while the Great Old Ones are transdimensional aliens whose forms are not determined by the laws of this cosmos.

One of the ways Lovecraftian sorcerers work is to make contact with the secret races of monsters that share the world with humankind. In Shadow Over Innsmouth we see Deep Ones summoned to the surface of the sea from their secret city beneath the Atlantic. This is one of the places where HPL mentions Walpurgisnacht and Hallowe’en. Old Captain Marsh rows out to Devil’s Reef, drops some cult objects from the ‘Indies’ into the water while ‘howling incantations’, and up come the fishmen.

The same tale tells of the establishment of regular worship of the Deep One’s undersea gods – probably ‘Father Dagon and Mother Hydra’ in the town of Innsmouth. The cult sets up house in a former masonic temple but we see no depiction of their rituals. Hints in the tale might lead us to imagine a new England meeting house, which can only lead to imagining what the sermons might have been like. Particularly horrifying if one finds that one of the best parts of cult life is the lack of homilies in ritual.

The Dunwich Horror provides what amounts to the iconic examples of Lovecraftian summoning rituals and cult activity. The tale describes the Whateley family of the Dunwich Mass district. We hear little of the ‘two centuries of Whateleys’ before him, but find the patriarch of the family – called ‘Wizard Whateley’ by the neighborhood - having inherited a collection of tattered occult tomes, and maintaining the cult of the Great Old Ones.

In this HPL lifts several images from his occult reading. Throughout the story events occur on the traditional dates of the ‘Witches sabbath’ – Halloween and Walpurgisnacht, of course, but in Dunwich also on Candlemas and Lamas. The cult meets on ‘sentinel hill’, a strange remnant of standing stones atop a round New England hilltop.

The passages from the diary of Wilbur Whateley (the youngster being raised inside the cult) give us the most complete look that we have into the mind of a worshipper of the Outer Gods.

“Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air.”

Here we see an example of HPL’s lack of occult understanding. “Sabaoth’ is a Hebrew divine name, frquestly used in medieval magic. Lovecraft mistakes it for an antique spelling of ‘sabbath’. That aside, the Whateleys are plainly trafficking with more than one kind of entity, those who answer both from ‘the hills’ and from ‘the air’.

“Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it.”

Here Lovecraft may be imitating eastern ritual styles. He implies a repetitious incantation like the mantras of Indic sorcery. The spell described produces visions of the secret lairs of the Old Ones, the placement at the poles again suggesting the HPL had been doing his occult reading.

• Temple and Shrine

Mythos magic takes the form of religion and ,later, of science. Depictions of ritual spaces are plainly religious – circles of stones, Groves built around monoliths and fire-pits, converted churches. When we see a solitary magician’s temple, in Charles Dexter Ward, it is a monumental construction of arches and pits, with “a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; …”

Old J Curwen and occult
items by J McKittrick

In “Dreams” we see hints of the rites of the witch Keziah Mason. She works in an outdoor temple on a river island, but keeps an attic workroom in the town. That room contains what turn out to be a small altar and kneeler. Once again HPL’s understanding of ritual is more New England than grimoire. We see a ‘magic circle’ in Charles Dexter Ward, but not in either Witch House or Dunwich. Lovecraft doesn’t seem to have integrated the idea, though he does suggest occult notae in the forms of Keziah Mason’s interdimensional gates.

The advice seems to be to go monumental – to find, especially, the ruins of a forgotten race or to raise a ritual space worthy of one. Keziah’s Outdoor temple was a ring of stones on an ‘ill-regarded island’ in the Miskatonic river. The Whateley cult worked ritual atop Sentinel Hill, in a ring of stones. Joseph Curwen’s temple was cathedral in scale.

Another example of this principle can be seen in The Haunter of the Dark. Here, once again, we see a common American church transformed into a cult temple. Set in the heart of Providence itself, the shunned building house the Starry Wisdom sect – a name that has echoed through modern occultism.

The church is decades abandoned when we see it, dusty, but left untouched by the fearfully superstitious neighbors. The investigator finds a library of Mythos books, a meeting room not much different from any New England church, and a more private ritual chamber on a floor above:

St. John's church, Providence,
model for the Starry Wisdom church.

In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island.

Again even in an urban, indoor environment the sought-for atmosphere is of looming giants and monumental powers.

• The Sabbath

Lovecraft adopted the notion of the Witch’s Sabbat from medieval folklore. His cultists attend group rituals held on the famous Sabbat dates – especially Walpurgisnacht (the Night of April 30th).  These rites are characterized by wild behavior, violence, murder and the interaction of humans with non-human races. All of these motifs are plainly taken from the medieval fantasy of the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ 

“They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr.”

Here we see that strange goal of the cult, to “clear off the Earth”.  Elsewhere in the same story we have the longest quote from the Necronomicon in all of HPL’s writing. It tells us that the earth once belonged to the GOO, and that they expect it to belong to them again. Young Wilbur muses:

“I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.”

In “The Thing On the Doorstep’ (which we’ll see again…) the Waite family attends secret festivals in the “wilds of Main”, which Lovecraft associates with the “Chesuncook witch-cult”. Unfortunately we never see this cult in any detail, but the gatherings involve mind-bending contacts with the old Ones and their spawn.

We are able to peer a little into the cultists’ world in the very early Mythos tale “The Festival’. A descendant of a cultist family returns to his crumbling new England seaport town of Kingsport to attend the traditional Yuletide gathering. He is led on what seems a series of hallucinatory journeys into alien sights and finally a strange underground ritual.

“…that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. … adore the sick pillar of

The Sabbat is a busy place...
looks like the line gets long.

flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation … something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; ... But what frightened me most was that flaming column; … casting no shadows as healthy flame should,...”

The tale ends with one of the few long quotes Lovecraft writes for the Necronomicon:

"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

There is one other direct depiction of Cthulhu-cult ritual, in “The Call of Cthulhu”. A Louisiana police inspector and his raiders approach a bayou ritual setting. This was a common enough chessy-horror trope in HPL’s day, but in his hands it goes in a strange direction.

“Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies... Now and then … would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

“

“On this now leaped and twisted a horde of human abnormality ... Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, … between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.”

Unfortunately for those hoping to find workable occultism in HPL’s work this is as close as we come to depiction of cult ritual. There are no examples of individual rituals for summoning the Great Old Ones. However, that changes a little when we get to the business of summoning the Dead.

• Necromancy, and the prolongation of life

In “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” we find bits of ritual magic mixed with alchemical tropes. We meet the colonial-era alchemist Joseph Curwen, newly arrived in Providence “from Salem”, and his descendant the eponymous Ward. Curwen was known as a seeker of the ‘philosopher’s stone’, but also feared for “certain sounds which they insisted came from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings…”. Despite his unsavory reputation Curwen marries among the Providence gentry.

We see one of HPL’s classic book-lists in Curwen’s library: “Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius's De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr.

Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” Of course every one of the books (or at least authors)  apart from the ol’ Nec is quite findable by the diligent bibliophile.

In time we discover that Curwen has been trying to perfect a means of raising the Dead by rendering their corpses into ‘essential saltes’. These physical essences can then produce restored bodies through the application of proper ritual. The sorcerer begins importing the stolen corpses of ancient magicians seeking to learn ever-greater secrets. His activities at last draw the ire of the town, and he is harried out of his house. His underground dens and laboratories are discovered but not destroyed, only to be rediscovered by Curwen’s descendant Ward.

We see that Curwen is part of a network of wizards, several of which are interested in his efforts. We see correspondence between them, one example of which includes what may be Lovecraft’s most influential quote in modern magic: “I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen a variant of this quoted as if it came from an actual occult source, I’d have a pile of nickels.

Curwen and his associates are depicted as participating in the New England witch cult that we have seen before. They convoke and attend the sabbat and participate together in their alchemical experiments. Alongside chemistry they discuss their ritual work.

One of the few descriptions of a solitary Mythos ritual is worth quoting at length. It seems to be the closest we get to the rite by which the ‘saltes’ are made to rise into form. It mixes traditional occult language with Lovecraft’s invented barbarous words:

“…young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house … This had been going on for two hours … when over all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in…. overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it; … there came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning, … and then was heard the voice … an archaic and forgotten language: 'DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'

… Charles was chanting again now … syllables that sounded like 'Yi nash Yog Sothoth he lgeb throdag' - ending in a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo.”

HPL seems to have enjoyed the notion of barbarous languages, and sounds barely reproducible by mortals. In this tale we find a two-fold incantation in what is often called R’lyehan. The first charm  is called ‘Dragon’s Head’ and the second ‘Dragon’s Tail’, after the two astrological symbols.

The first brings form out of the saltes, and the second destroys that form.  This entire section is certainly the most overt display of solitary Mythos ritual material in the entire canon.

This theme in CoCDW conceals what HPL clearly means to be the greater horror – the efforts by Mythos sorcerers to prolong their own life at the expense of that of another.

HPL’s fascination with the prolongation of life begins with his first published story, written as a teenager, The Alchemist. In that tale we see a noble family cursed by an ‘alchemist’. It ends with the revelation that the alchemist himself has haunted the family, living by his potion-granted immortality.

 “'Fool!' he shrieked, 'Can you not guess my secret? ... Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? … I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!'”

We have looked at The Thing On the Doorstep previously. In it the sorcerer Ephraim Waite prolongs his life by inhabiting the bodies of his descendants, and then of others as required. Unfortunately we see little of the specifics of that process. The young husband is taken into the Mythos witch-cult by Ephraim’s daughter. We hear that the ‘wizard’ (as HPL often says) “…found it in the Necronomicon - the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on - body to body to body - he means never to die.”

We learn a little more of that formula in Charles Dexter Ward. There we see the sorcerer Curwen preparing for  “ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ------. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.

And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.”

Curwen intends to send an enchantment into the future, to cause a descendant to restore him to life.

• Oneiromancy, and the Exploration of Other Worlds

One of the core goals of occult story and practice is the vision of other worlds, and even the ability to travel to them. Lovecraft mines this vein in some detail.

 

A really excellent Dreamlands map.

A series of Lovecraft’s early stories is set in the Dreamlands, a semi-real locale metaphysically adjacent to our world. Those with skill at dreaming may find the Gate of Deeper Slumber and enter into a realm very like the fantasy realms of the popular stories of Lovecraft’s day. Strange cities with names like Ulthar and Sarnoth teem with thieves, artisans and magicians. Human dreamers come and go, but some remain, even passing from life in our world to life in that other place. In this we see one of the few happy outcomes HPL imagined for his characters.

The Dreamlands also contain nightmares including various of the Great Old Ones, such as Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. The Night-Gaunts dwell there, and ghouls cross between the tunnels of the Dreamworld and those beneath our own graveyards and charnel houses.  

In “Dreams In The Witch House” we find a crossover between dream travel and material journeying. Young Walter Gilman rents the old witch’s room, and so comes to her attention. He discovers her papers and notes, and is astonished that the angles and calculations of her occult diagrams express certain ideas in non-Euclidian geometry. Soon his dreams begin to produce physical souveniers, and it becomes clear that the strange witch’s diagrams are in fact gates that allow material travel into other worlds. The line between interplanetary wonders, inter-dimensional danger and big Black Men of the Sabbat becomes quite indistinct, as befits a tale about dreams.

Finally, in Lovecraft’s last published tale, “The Whisperer In Darkness” we return to the notion of backwoods cultists preserving forgotten ways. However here Lovecraft is turning more and more toward a science fiction model, and the strange, unearthly beings with whom the human cultists make pact are in fact quite material aliens, using at least partially material science.

“Whisperer” is the most overt combination of science fiction and occult adventure tropes in Lovecraft’s writing. The rustics of Vermont are actually worshipping the material aliens called, confusingly, the Old Ones. In exchange the aliens give them stories and visions of the interstellar heavens, and occasionally provide real experiences of them. The method used to produce those experiences is more surgical than sorcerous.

“This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills...”

 The glimpses of ritual depicted are merely snippets of liturgical repetition, chanted group-ritual phrases.

• Talismans and Eldritch Images.

Lovecraft grew up in the golden age of archeological discovery. Every month some strange new eidolon from the ancient world appeared, revealing a facet of cults previously unknown. Religions from the east had arrived in North America, bringing enlivened idols and talismans more exotic than the scapulars of the Roman Church.

Lovecraft begins using this trope immediately in his writing, in “The Hound”. The two grave-robbing adventurers discover a sorcerer’s talisman, and off we go. In “The Terrible Old Man” we are shown hints of a necromantic practice by which spirits are trapped in bottles, each containing a pendulum which the spirit can swing to tap the side of the bottle, allowing a degree of communication. This is one of HPL’s creepier occult gimmicks, one worthy of imitation, if not of actual performance.

 

More McKittrick
The Coffer of old Cap'n Marsh

In Call of Cthulhu, again, we find special talismans that are thrown into the sea to summon the Deep Ones to make deals. Even the presence of an inspired image of Cthulhu, unconsecrated by any ritual, participates in the scary power of the Old One. In general images of the Old Ones are perilously close to presences of the Old Ones, an attitude that Lovecraft could as easily have gotten from the anti-Catholic superstitions of Protestant Christianity as from any occult source.

The crowning example of a Mythos talisman might be the Shining Trapezohedron, from the ‘Haunter of the Dark’ series that HPL wrote along with the young Robert Bloch. In that tale the young writer “Robert Blake” returns to his providence home and sets up in a garret with a marvelous window-view of the city that HPL so loved. He becomes fascinated with a dark old church and, researching its history, discovers it to be the site of dark cult activity in recent times. Visiting the ruined church he discovers a typical trove of mythos books, and a stone talisman called the “Shining Trapezohedron”, which summons the central monster of the tale. The cult and talisman are connected the the GOO Nyarlathotep, though in one of his inhuman manifestations. This Mythos prop seems to have caught the imagination of Anton Lavey, who made his ‘Satanic’ altar a trapezoid. This in turn inspired various other neo-Satanist symbolism, and the ‘trapezoid’, which has no traditional occult connotation, is a common Satanic image. Undoubtedly it is too complex to build a trapezohedron out of plywood.

 

Lovecraft’s depiction of the business of occultism is based primarily on newspaper sensationalism and horror clichés, buttressed by readings in medieval superstition and a small amount of reading in real occult and magical material. Mythos magic is plainly religious in form, involving offerings to and praise of mighty entities, and the use of their powers and minions. Some of these religionists seem to be mere cultists, seduced by the wild orgies and intense experiences, others are in the mold of wizards, real seekers after the secrets of the world. The former tend to be mere food-stockpiles. The latter sometimes obtain power for a time, but usually end up in some state that Lovecraft’s materialist metaphysic intends to be a tortured Hell.

And blessings of the season!

on to Pt 6

Pollution and Purification (Wisdom Way 2)

Life contains terrible things. Fate weaves as it weaves, and all beings make our way by our wit and strength

among the weavings. For some, life presents terrible moments. Fear, pain, disgust, horror are the unpleasant, mind-torturing results of the exposure of a common mortal to those moments.

For most people disease and violent crime are common causes of such reactions. Natural disasters and random destruction can happen anywhere. The mortal heart reels when the material things of a lifetime are washed or burned away in hours.

I am, on Wednesdays, an animist. My animism tells me that all these things must have or be spirits. The ancients understood this. Many of these terrible things were the province of the Shining Gods. Apollon ruled the plague, Poseidon the earthquake, Ares ruled war. Here is a mystery – all these terrible things are holy. Gaelic lore tells us that poets are often made great only when their hearts are turned by some terrible moment. However we also know that many are broken by those same events, and many struggle long and hard before the choice between broken and whole is clear.

The ancients held that exposure to such duress produced spiritual and social ill. They referred to this tendency as “impurity”, and worked rites and customs to purify those who had been exposed. It is safe to say that in ancient times these ideas were caught up in notions of morality. However in our time we may, if we like, take a more therapeutic approach without losing the flavor of the old customs.

I believe that in our time we suffer needlessly from a lack for formal method for relieving the stress and horror of life’s ill times. As we develop our Pagan ritual set, it seems to me that rites of purification, relief and heart-healing can be a valuable. Again, this need not imply that impurity equals moral wrong, any more than does material dirtiness. It merely acknowledges that some effects are unpleasant, and that we will be better off without them.

This isn’t a scholarly paper, and I don’t intend to review what we know about Hellenic or Roman or Vedic spiritual pollution and purification. Instead I’m going to do what I usually do, and try to summarize and synthesize some sense out of my fact-salad brain. I’d like to try to discern the core ideas behind the things that were considered to be polluting.

1: Death, Risk of Death, and Injury – In terms of producing fear and lasting trauma, nearness to death and the circumstances that might cause it must be top of the list. For the ancients this produced a taboo on handling corpses and on contact with blood.

In our time there is little that is more unsettling than contact with injury and death. From the passing of a

loved one, to a random encounter with death on the street to even an account of death in the media, closeness to this great and frightening thing produces shock and fear. Spilled blood remains such an intrinsically powerful moment that a few people will always have a palpably physical reaction of revulsion. I’ve seen folks fall right over at the sight of blood.

Disease falls into this category as well. Any disease of sufficient strength can remind us of death, in ourselves and others. The ancients sometimes attributed physical disease to spiritual causes, especially to pollution and contact with taboo circumstances. While we need not go so far, we can recall that a troubled mind does not best support the health of the body. From the animist perspective, again, we must assume that diseases can or do exist as spirits, or as the attacks of spirits that can be approached in a spiritual way.

What are we to make of this? I’m suggesting that if events disturb our hearts, if they gnaw at our calm or distract us from our interest then there may be an advantage in a meditative and ritual purification. It’s like having one’s hands dirty as one approaches the cooking – best to wash off.

2: Sex, and the Desire for Sex – Let’s take as a given the thick layers of patriarchal, theological and modernist moralizing about this subject. All of that aside, the urge to indulge in sexual pleasure is innate, and the new adult will develop what strategies they can. The balance between fleshly inclination and social permission produces levels of stress that can seem (especially to the young) equivalent to risk of death.

Ancient Greeks depicted sexual desire as daemons with whips, lashing poor mortals through the world in pursuit of their imagined ideals. Great tragedies hang on the foolish choices we make in pursuit of our ‘One True Love’ or ‘Perfect Lay’. This was entirely contrasted with what was understood as domestic love, and familial or friendly affection. While I think that modern cultural trends have somewhat relieved the burdens of medieval moral codes the driving goad of sexual desire can disturb our hearts as surely as can fear.

Among our Druids we have had occasional discussions about what ‘sexual impurity’ or ‘illicit sex’ might consist of in our context. The list was not long. I suppose my favorite answer is “sex you regret’.

3: Family, and Social Duty – I’m writing this in the “Holiday’ season in the US, a time that for many brings the stresses of family and social interaction to the fore. Ancient notions of the duty that children and parents owe to one another still cling in our psyches, and conflict with modern notions of individuality and liberty.

Even outside the family, social obligations bring us into contact with sometimes-irreconcilable conflicts of expectation. Then there are those moments when we screw up. Oathbreaking, lawbreaking and the various smaller betrayals of life can also disturb our peace.

How can I put it? If it makes you feel fucked-up, it’s pollution.

It is the psychic or spiritual or magical residue of those encounters, those feelings, those small, biting imps, which we mean to wash away with ritual purification.

There are some very specific instances in our culture when I think such rites of purification might be of special value.

It was the business of supporting returning war veterans that prompted this reflection. In many cultures those who are sent out to deal death in the name of the people are offered various kinds of spiritual comfort. Psychological damage from participation in war can be extreme, as shown by tales from ancient times and statistics from today.

Traditional Christianity offers relief from the burden of ‘sin’, but that leaves soldiers in a funny place. Have they sinned in doing their duty? Perhaps they have not, but that does not relieve them of the disruption that killing and contact with death must bring, no matter how well justified. In the context I propose that deeds do not have to be morally wrong to be disruptive and polluting – they simply have to bring us into contact with fear, dismay and confusion.

Safety professionals find themselves in similar circumstances, as must medical professionals. Clergy, counselors and many helping vocations may find themselves entangled. Anyone who seeks a lover, keeps a job or raises a family may find themselves in need of purification.

There’s no end to the number of screwed-up emotional responses I can see to this. Most important, I think, will be to remove guilt and shame from this sort of impurity. This has been an ongoing process in late-Christian and post-Christian culture. We have largely eliminated the social stigma from cancer, though we are still working at it in terms of mental illness, diabetes and other diseases. In the same way we can realize that we need not be ‘at fault’ to require purification and healing. It is not an admission of error, in itself, though it may involve that. It is not an admission of weakness, though it may be an effort to grow in strength.

Especially, we must note that it is possible to become screwed up by doing things that are right and good. Neither the cosmos nor our minds and bodies have any intrinsic moral value or agenda. They do not care whether you had Every Right or No Other Choice. The course of wisdom and justice occasionally calls for terrible deeds. They do not cease to be terrible by being morally correct. To execute a criminal, slaughter a hundred animals or kill the opponents of one’s people is intrinsically disruptive to the human spiritual condition, however firm the rationalization that supports it might be. Even a war hero comes home needing to be relieved of the burden of stress (leave aside imagined ‘guilt’) that hard service gives.

From my perspective as a Pagan ritual priest I am interested in developing methods and customs that will allow those who have been in contact with ill to receive relief from the feeling of dirtiness and the social unwelcome that accompanies it. I have seen myself how a sense of disconnection and emotional imbalance encourages people to neglect spiritual work. If we don’t feel worthy it becomes difficult to worship. If we’re dirty it feels rude to come to the gods’ table.

As a Pagan priest I think it is sensible for us to work toward developing ritual and meditative methods that allow people to calm their hearts and refocus their minds on their path. These rites need to combine social efforts with personal trance and self-awareness, along with the active involvement of the gods and spirits. Meditative work should be crafted for householders and the only-mildly-religious; modular trance ‘spells’ can be accompanied with ‘teachings’ about emotional management. This is the kind of work that begins to make Yr Hmble a little nervous. I will experiment on myself with magick arte as I please (and maybe on my wife ; ), but when we start designing works intending to fiddle with the emotional constitutions of others I become a little twitchy. Nevertheless I think our communities can benefit by the effort.

I’m unprepared, as yet, to make hard prescriptions on this matter. Some notes:

Trance and Reframing:

• Separate moral guilt or social shame from the fact of pollution.

• Calm the body through relaxation and basic meditation

• Perhaps use Two powers: Underworld to dissolve and wash away residue, Heavens to restore original patterns and energize

• Could connect directly with Augeidies work – trance presence of the Agathos Daimon or Da Fein.

Questions toward ritual practices:

•Confession – a Big Question. There are obvious merits to the practice, but some real theoretical concerns as well. If the pollution is the result of criminality, deceit of ill-deed, then I wouldn’t want to offer purification without social restitution. When the deed is inadvertent or sanctioned, as in war, then I’m far from sure I care to make the subject recite the items that trouble them.

• Restitution – My question is how to balance the personal and social values of this complex of customs. In typical modern Pagan fashion I’m inclined to have the business be about the individual, about their own peace and calm. Those who view social guilt and shame as an important goad to good behavior will be concerned about the idea of relieving ill-feelings without restitution for ill-deeds. On the other hand society is not well-served by cycles in which emotional confusion caused by a previous ill-deed becomes, itself, the goad to further criminality. Is it worthwhile to offer a service of grace, with confession and restitution a separate matter?

• Material symbols- this is the easy part. I would assemble as many members of the subject’s community as can/will come, and lay a sacrifice for the subjects’ preferred gods. There will need to be a hymn or litany written that has the right hooks. (A biggish challenge…) I would compose a set of water-and-fire customs to materially contain the purification power, and work the whole deal under the gods of the subject’s house.

Less serious pollutions can be dealt with much more simply, with water-and-fire blessings, ritual baths, etc. These should, in my opinion, become regular parts of Pagan spiritual practice, for the benefits of calm and freedom that they provide. Daily shrine practice for families and solitaries should, in my opinion, certainly contain simple versions of this sort of purification.

To lay the dog on the table, my goal is to aim for therapeutic goals while removing attention from the common self and focusing it on community, the gods and on the higher self. If we build a religious context in which people understand that the duress of life produces spiritual impurity that can be relieved by ritual action we will have a powerful set of instruments for helping non-specialists benefit from spiritual work.

The Death Song Poster

I've posted this verse before, a repaganized charm from the Carmina Gadelica.
This past Saturday I helped manage a funeral rite for a friend and Coleague, Ron White.
A heathen, he was an Odinsman, a student of Runes and lore and an aspiring magician. He has gone too soon.
This verse was too Gaelic for the rite, but I think of Ron as I post this little art-setting of the poem.

A Taxonomy of Occult Groups

Someone asked about “western occult groups”. The question got my attention, so I produced this quick summary. There are some categories about which I know nothing – Martinists come to mind, and I have not attempted to categorize or list so-called ‘left-hand-path’ groups. Most of those would come under the ‘Modern Sorcery’ category, I suppose. Otherwise I think this is a fairly complete set of big categories, and I've done a lot of your searching for you, in the links. No mention of eastern systems here – I’m not quite ready to list Vajrayana groups as ‘occult’ training centers. Also, this list is focused on systems in which a student can learn practical occult arts or specialist spiritual skills. If the work is focused on devotional religion or therapy, it isn't in this category. Forgive me if this is boring – sometimes I’m storing stuff so that I’ll never have to type it again : ).
1: Classics
a: The Masons - not much real occultism left, but a ritual style that defines a whole school

b: Theosophical Society -not much ritual but the very origin of much modern occult and New Age thinking

c: Rosicrucians - there aren't any real ones, but much of the stuff written as Rosicrucian is valuable. Related to the Masons.

d: Traditional Sorcery - the grimoires are a provable inheritance of magic, but not to everyone's taste.

An early-modern Rose Cross

'Conjure' and 'hoodoo' are in funny positions, as they make some effort to systematize traditional spellcraft into 'systems'. 'Witchcraft' is pretty much whatever anyone says it is, but it contains a great deal of of folk-magic inheritance.

2: Magical Orders - these mainly use a post-Masonic model - lessons, degrees, hierarchy, solemn, verbal ritual. Some are more occult than others.

a: Golden Dawn - all current-day orders are restarts, imo, though there are some slim lineages from the

The Rose Cross of the occultists of
the Order of the Golden Dawn.

original order. Lots of good stuff if you want a university-class magical education.

b: Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) - specifically post-masonic occult order from Germany, that 'converted’ to Aleister Crowley's Thelema system in the early 20th c. Thelema is a modern Gnosticism that seeks personal wisdom and power in harmony with all things.

There are uncountable splinter, inheritor and imitator groups of these two major systems. Notable ones include the Servants of Light, and the Builders of the Adytum.

c: The A:.A:. : Crowley’s effort to send a distilled initiatory training down the line of students. Personal training inside a fairly classical hermetic/Qabalistic outline.

3: Pagan Witchcraft - these systems arose in the firt half of the 20th c as part of the occult revival.

a: Traditional Initiatory Wicca or Witchcraft - systems based on initiation into 'covens' which are small working magical orders. Each one has its own flavor even within traditions. Major traditions of this style include Gardnerians, Alexandrians, some Feri and lots of imitators and splinters. The Correllian Nativist Tradition is creating an initiatory Wiccan tradition connected through the internet, and may be of interest to students.

A Wiccan altar

b: Eclectic Religious Wicca - invented as a reaction to the exclusivity of Traditional Wicca this is a loosely defined Neopagan category. Local circles may exist anywhere. Circle Sanctuary may be the largest body associated with this sort of thing. It also crosses over into "women's religion" and the goddess movement. Much of this category remains interested in magical arts, though it merges with devotional Paganism.

4: Modern Sorcery & Chaos Magic – late 20^th c systems that tried to set aside traditional mythic and religious trappings to focus on results-based magic. These systems are mainly transmitted in books and articles, and practiced privately, with few teaching or practice groups visible to the public.
a: The Illuminates of Thanateros – was perhaps the original Chaos Magic order. Chaos Magic began as an effort by British occultists to step away from the doctrines of the ‘classics’, above, and approach magic from first principles. One interesting side-effect of the Chaos movement has been to direct western magicians toward ATR, and practical sorcery.

A Traditional Witchcraft altar

b: Practical Spellcraft - often defined, itself, as 'sorcery'. As with Hoodoo and Conjure the mass of western tradition practical occultism is being re-systematized by modern occultists. Traditional modes of spellcraft from candle-magic to poppets are being syncretized with African and European ancestor and spirit-work, eastern forms and modern occultism. While no major 'schools' have arisen as yet, notable teachers include Jason Miller, Brother Moloch and, for a lighter touch, the Grey School of Wizardry, which teaches both adults and younger students.
c: ‘Traditional’ Witchcraft – groups and practitioners seeking to work magic as an early-modern ‘witch’ might have done. These are usually a combination of folkloric elements with occult innovations, informed by the same stories as Pagan Witchcraft, but with the religious elements downplayed in favor of a sorcerous aesthetic. This category can include varieties of Luciferianism, and the so-called Left Hand Path. Solitary practice is common, and organizations are local and usually private or secret. There are a few publishing initiatory traditions of this sort of Witchcraft such as the as the Tubal Cain lineages, and Sabbatic Witchcraft  .

A Santerian Altar

5: African Traditional Religion – not part of ‘western magic’ but increasingly influential. These are often systems with unbroken inheritances back to polytheist times. ATR is organized into local ‘houses’ and Voudou, Santeria, the Palo lineages, and various Brazilian spiritisms. Admission to active membership in most ATR is by initiation and training, though some branches offer public worship and access to occult services to non-initiates.

6: Ethnic or Traditional Paganism – systems that attempt to restore worship of known ancient Gods through known ancient forms. These vary in the amount of occultism that may be taught and used – some are strictly religion.

A Heathen altar

a: Heathens are those working with the gods and ways of the ancient North Germans, the Scandinavians (often thought of as “the Vikings”). This includes Germanic-language groups across Europe into Great Britain, the Troth, the Asatru Folk Assembly and many others. Many Heathens call themselves “Asatru” – meaning “true to the Gods”. Northern Tradition Paganism takes a less scholastic, more vision-driven path toward those same Gods and spirits.

A Druidic 'altar' for Yuletide.

b: ‘Druids’ and Celtic Polytheists. Celtic Reconstructionists work to understand and rebuild Celtic religious practice, disregarding the revival Druidic traditions. Like other ethnic restoration movements Celtic Reconstructionism often provides little occult instruction.

‘Druids’ are either British post-masonic inheritors or American Neopagans, for the most part. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids is the largest British order, while Ár nDraíochtFéin (ADF) is the largest US group. Both include active interest in traditional magical practices.
c: Ancient Egyptian (Khemetic), Hellenes, Slavs, and Baltic peoples are also in this game, though often with a minimum of 'occult' content.

If I have forgotten or misrepresented your tradition or system, please feel free to let me know in comments. I'll update this article if I find myself truly in error.

Rune Classes This Winter

Yes, I'm primarily a Celtoid, but I've been working with the Runes for decades.
In these classes I try to provide a good basis in real lore, while providing plenty of practical
applications for modern Pagan magicians.

Magic and Religion. (part 3,523)

There’s a discussion flowing around the Pagan blogosphere about the place of Magical art in Pagan religion. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I think it is central to the future of spiritual practice in the west. If we want to progress past the boundaries of Europe’s traditional monotheisms, then we must have a place for magic as a sacred part of spirituality.

Annoyingly, I suppose that I must define my terms. By magic I mean the conscious application of spiritual principles for personally-willed goals. By spirituality I mean the work of conforming the self with (spiritual) reality in such a way as to produce peace, freedom and happiness for the individual. Plainly these two terms might work either in harmony or at odds. I find the goal of wisdom to be to bring them into harmony. By religion I mean a system of belief and practice, often drawn from traditional magic, that intends to produce spirituality in those who work it.

A great deal is made in modern time of religions as tools of social control of the individual. Certainly that has been one of the social uses for religion, especially in eras when religion and state were united. However in my experience that use is becoming obsolete in the modern world. Social concensus and state enforcement seem no longer to require the sanction of the divine in order to be accepted by common people.

For westerners that leaves ‘a religion’ as ‘a systematic approach to spiritual practice’. This needn’t leave out a moral element – many religions begin mystical teaching with moral instruction. It does tend to focus religion on the practical – on methods that produce the experiences of spirituality, rather than on moral or social conformation. That’s what I mean, generally, by ‘a religion’ – ‘a system intended to produce a specific set of spiritual experiences’.

My inclination is to view ‘magic’ as the core principle in all the above terms. In religions the methods used to work with the divine – meditation, devotion, right action – are all directed by individual will. Any willed reach toward the divine is a magical act. The ancient Christians perceived this and were so concerned to remove human will from the equation that they imagined the divine will deciding which individuals would be able to conceive the will toward the divine. I think we can happily discard such convolution and admit our freedom to choose.

So then, to me, a religion is a specific expression of the methods of magic. A religion (I try not to speak about ‘religion’ as a general category any more than I must) is a set of mental positions, acts and goals that intends to connect the individual self with a reality that transcends the self. The Roman church adapted theurgic invocation and talismanic art in creating itself. Buddhism adapted tantra and various local sorceries. Even in Islam Sufi ways preserved older mystical methods. In my opinion it is this core of magical practice that brings the spark of real contact with the spirits, and real contact with spirit(s) is the core of working religion.

That’s why I see magic as the core business of this complex – it is willed application of spiritual principles. It is by will that we establish our relations with the gods and spirits, by will that we keep our local cult, by will that we explore the realms of spirits. From these efforts we compose the personal religion of our hearth and home-temple, and support our local village religion.

On a traditional level, we find ourselves bumping up against  definitions of magic that imply impiety and disapproval. It is easy to understand magic as spell-casting and divination, both of which might be understood as efforts to raise personal will above that of the gods, and thus impiety. (Let’s leave aside for the moment whether that raising is in fact impious – I disagree with those who say that it is.)

Magic is much more than spellbinding. The longer I study the clearer it becomes to me that the old cliché – “Magic is the yoga of the west” is precisely so. In fact it is just as accurate to say that yoga is the sorcery of the east. Yoga concerns itself both with spiritual growth and gain of wisdom, and also with occult powers and abilities. Yes, I know that many teachers discount the latter, yet it is never absent from traditional yogas. Unlike the category of ‘magic’ in the west, yoga has remained part of orthodox and mainstream Hinduism. There are as many sects and kinds of yoga as of magic, certainly, but the central ideas of yogic (and tantric) esotericism are largely normative in Hindu thought.

So magic, in our Pagan models, is the technical and formal application of the principles of spiritual reality. This can be used for common good – love, wealth, family, etc. It can also be used to produce powerful personal experiences. The style of work that we inherit as ‘high magic’ began in efforts to retain personal temple rituals of Pagan times in secret. When we make a shrine in our home, put up an image, make offerings to it with invocation, etc, we are surely doing magic as well,  I think, as religion. In the same way when we prepare a careful bundle of symbols, imbued with the hidden powers of herbs and stones, present them to the land-spirits and  ‘charge’ them with our intent we are still participating in the religious model of our Paganism, even as we work our personal and individual will.

I suppose that is my hope for our Paganism – that occult and esoteric methods will have a normative place in our religions. Divination, trance-vision, rites intended to produce increase in bounty or happiness – these are traditionally ‘occult’ arts that make perfect sense inside Pagan religions. Of course these are largely specialist skills. We can offer them to general students of our ways, but only those with the inclination will devote the effort required to grasp them. To have them present in our mix is like yeast in the mash, I think – the power that enchants the common, and brings spirit into matter.

My Books; A Self-Review for Buyers

Gifting at the solstice season is an old and honorable custom, stretching back into Pagan time, along with drinking and feasting. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, whatever our religious inclinations, the solstice season is a time for enjoying friends and kin, and sharing the bounty that the year has brought. Here at the always-annoying initial descent of winter I am already looking forward to Yule morning, when the light begins to grow again.

Regular readers will know that I write books and sell them. I’ve done this a long time, though I have yet to have a main-stream publication. (The truth is I’m only a little motivated. The advantages of self-publishing continue to appeal to me. ) As a result I am sometimes asked how to approach my material in an orderly way, or, “what to read first”. In an effort to reduce the retyping of the answer to that question I’ll try to put the important stuff in order here.

If you are looking to read my books, you are hoping to learn about a practical approach to modern Celtic-style religion and magic. I freely refer to what I do as Pagan, though my material is radically different from much of modern Pagan practice. I begin with a reconstructionist’s concern for the original and reliably authentic lore of the Celts, especially the Gaels. To that I add a modern mage’s willingness to reframe, reinvent and experiment. In general I am more concerned with occultism and sorcery than with religion, mainly just as my personal inclination. However all my magical work is framed inside the Pagan religious model in which I work. Blog readers will know my opinion about the intimate connection between religion and magic.

Had I been interested in fame as an occultist, I’d have been an eclectic. Instead I have hitched my wagon to the specific ritual format and cosmology devised within ADF’s Druidry. Fortunately that format has come to be more in tune with trends (and/or contributed to them) in modern magic over the last decades. The modern interest in real work with spirits based on offering, divination and blessing fits very nicely (imhhaa opinion) with the work that I’ve devised. Readers used to working in a post-Wiccan or post-Masonic ritual style will find plenty in the material that can be adapted for their own work.

Prologue:

1: ADF’s Dedicant Path: The 150 page book that comes with one’s first year of ADF membership provides a simple introduction to the symbol system and ritual forms used in the rest of my work. I wrote most of the material, and edited the most recent edition. Even if one is uncertain about ADF as a primary Pagan path the material in our training, and the community of support, is valuable for those interested in non-Wiccan modern Pagan directions.

The Dedicant materials are available only with a one-year ADF membership. Note that all the following are available at my Lulu shop, except for SFHW, which is available at Amazon from ADF Publishing.

  

Top Tier:

2: Sacred Fire, Holy Well, A Druid’s Grimoire. This was the first formal writing I did about

our Druidic system. The core material began as a pamphlet for our local Grove in 1991. By the end of the 90s it had grown into the 300 page item it is now. In truth, all the themes of my later work are present here. If there’s a fault in the book it is that the rites were written to be performed for and by medium to large groups. The seasonal rites are based on our local Grove rites, where we readily have a half-dozen voices available, and the magical rites are written for myself and a partner to work for a fairly large group. The rites have been criticized as unworkable by solitaries, and that may be true.

However I continue to get good reviews from readers who find the book useful for developing a personal practice. It is a multi-category compendium with an introduction, at least, to the whole shootin’ - match.

 3: The Book of Nine Moons. This is a formal system of weekly exercises intended to provide initiation in magical skills and alliances over nine months.  It begins with a program of daily prayer and offering, and works its way into a fully consecrated home shrine and tools, practical magic and spellcraft and the work of gaining familiar spirits. It is specifically written for solitary performance. It includes no seasonal rites, focusing on personal hearth-cult and magical work.

It is, according to students who have attempted it, an intense and challenging program. I based the model on the kind of work that we expected of ourselves back when I was running a training coven. It may be that the pace is too brisk for someone working the system at home alone. I do (still) plan on expanding it into a slower-paced set of trainings, but that has been slow to happen. Those who have completed some basic familiarization with Druidic ritual (say, the Dedicant’s work) will find more of the more advanced material in one place in this book than anywhere else.

Having run a few students through the Nine Moons work I realized that much of the material might be of interest to folks not involved in Our Druidry. I decided that two of the primary teachings of the system ought to be broken out an offered to more general readers, apart from a rigorous general training. Those are the spirit-arte material, and the teachings on trace and vision-work.

 4: The Book of Summoning.  This book presents a systematic approach to gaining the aid and friendship of the spirits (especially non-deific spirits) and beginning to employ them in magic. It begins with a summary explanation of our Druidic ritual form, proceeds with a suite of rites intended to ‘introduce’ the magician to the spirits, and then proceeds to the work of making alliances.

This book contains my final-to-date efforts to apply principles of classic magical spirit work as found in the grimoires to a polytheist, alliance-based model. The rites have been tested by several magicians now to good effect, and I’m confident offering the material. I expect the system to be especially useful for those working to gain primary familiar allies among the Dead and the Landwights.

 5: The Book of Visions. Again using material lifted from the Nine Moons system, this book brings together the exercises for energy-work and vision-trance into a set of progressive exercises. This includes an invention of which I am fairly proud, the Nineteen Working. The working is a sit-down energy, meditation and visualization pattern based in a modern understanding of Celtic Pagan symbols.  It offers both an opportunity for mystical insight, and an important level of understanding and authority for spirit work.

The focus of the book’s vision-work is the construction and use of an Inner Nemeton – a visualized temple and workspace that serves as an arrival and departure point for further vision. This is presented in some detail, in a series of scripted trances. Also provided are exercises intended to allow an approach to the personal Higher Genius, here conceived in a Pagan way.

Let me say this plainly – I don’t recommend buying both the Book of Nine Moons and the two “Books of…”. There is some new material in each of the latter (more in the Book of Summoning) but they mainly reframe material from the full system. The two later books are more modular, easier to adapt to a personal a la carte practice. The Book of Nine Moons is a complete system.

Second Tier

6: The Court of Brigid Grimoire. This is a complete ritual suite for approaching the

goddess Brigid, meeting her primary ‘ministers’ or ‘angels’ or ‘daemons’ and working with the servant spirits of her ‘court’. It is based entirely on the methods presented in the Book of Summoning (and to some degree in Sacred Fire, Holy Well). It could be worked directly from the text by a new student, but some study of the underlying system will certainly reduce confusion.

 7: Draiocht;  A Celtic Sorcery Primer.  As titled, this is a simple introduction to the system, along with a collection of deity invocations, spells and trances. If you want a walk-through of the kind of magic this is, this could be the book for you.

 8: Beginning Practical Magic. This old monograph began life as a transcription of a day-long workshop on spellbinding and practical work. It remains chatty in tone, but it also still sells widely, especially in e-book. The advice and teaching has been rewritten in Sacred Fire, Holy Well.

 9: Spirit Talk; Seedling of Pagan Theologies. Articles on Pagan theologies originally published on this blog.

 10: The Book of the Dragon. What can I say; I wrote this in 1982 or so, in a first attempt

to synthesize my art. It is Wiccan in ritual form, but contains attempts at new work combining shamanistic methods with ritual magic. Very primitive by my current standards, but the art is fairly cool.

Me Having Fun

11: The Fire and Well Spellbook. This was me having fun with typesetting. It is all the ritual material from Sacred Fire, Holy Well arranged in a pretty type-face. Buy the hardback if you want something romantic for your wizard’s library.

12: Blank Books and Journals. (buggy-whips and sealing-wax on the left…). Keep an eye out, I put different ones up. Also see lots of them at my Tabula Rasa shop. 

13: Liber Spirituum. The grimoire tradition of magic includes the idea of a Book of Spirits – a personal book in which one collects the names, sigils and ‘signatures’ of the spirits with whom one has made pacts. This is my typeset of one for myself. The decoration is Celtic, but it would work for any spirit-arte collection.

And…

The Dwale of Afagddu. My small effort at a Cthulhu Mythos tome begins with a weird tale of ancient Wales, telling the secret story behind Cerridwen’s brewing. It then provides a grimoires of mythos rites. It walks a line between actually performable and why bother, but it includes a variety of fake-evil sorcerous Cthulhu art by me.

I write because I like writing, and because I hope that my words and ideas may be of value to other modern Pagans and occultists. I do my own typesetting and art, and enjoy making a book an expression of magic. May my readers be blessed by the work.