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I’ve been getting such good feedback on the recent book reviews I’ve posted, so it’s obvious we are all fellow book lovers. Great. That brought to mind that in my most recent book, Meetings with Remarkable Magicians – Life in the Occult Underground, there are some “official” book recommendations that have been useful to me in my magical questing. As a weekend treat, I will excerpt this from Meetings for you, so you can get them all for Christmas – including my book, of course.
INSPIRATIONS
In each life there are sources of inspiration that continually spark the engine to take us further than we thought or felt was possible. It could be an insight while meditating, a conversation, an unexpected meeting, or just some plain old books. In my own case it’s been a healthy mix of all these things. But the books are special, of course, because you can return to them again and again, and the good ones deliver over and over. Perhaps not exactly always in the same way, but certainly with an inexplicable lift or boost that means it continues to speak to deeper layers of your mind or soul. It could be how it’s written, what is written, who has written it, or a mix of all these elements; something undefinable makes you come back to re-quench your thirst for inspiration.
For me as an author, there are also many examples of books that have inspired me for specifically literary reasons; some of them transcending or touching the mystical or magical. But I want to share here some of the key books that continue to inspire my thinking, feeling, willing and being, as they have all been fodder on and for my own specifically magical journey.
This doesn’t necessarily imply that they will be relevant for other people, but it never hurts to give recommended books a try, does it? My own experience tells me that the book lists and other similar references included in, for instance, all those wonderful 1980s LP liner notes and underground anthologies such as RE/search, Apocalypse Culture and Rapid Eye were absolutely quintessential for my own detective and deductive work to begin and gradually assume form.
Joseph Campbell – The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
My friend Tim O’Neill gave me a copy of this book in San Francisco in 1989, and I will always be grateful for that. Campbell is a giant in disseminating mythic functions in history and culture, and how they relate to human development on both micro- and macro levels. This particular book has the subtitle ”Metaphor as Myth and as Religion” and that basically sums it up. Essentially it’s an anthology of early 1980s lectures, and Campbell guides us through basics of Cosmology, Mythic Imagination, Psychological Transformation, and the necessity of Art as a bridge or interface between the inner and outer worlds (or spaces). In so many ways, this book has been a guiding light for me in developing my theories of Occulture, Occulturation, Sympathesis, the Mega Golem, and returning to the denominationally stripped, ”gnostic” source for the insights that really matter.
Anton LaVey – The Devil’s Notebook
LaVey signed a copy of this book for me on what was to be our last meeting: ”To Carl – An excursion into the Devil’s fane – Rege Satanas! Anton Szandor LaVey.” And it truly is a fane: an ever surprising sacred source or shrine of wisdom, humor, and insight. Basically an anthology of LaVey’s short essays for the Church of Satan newsletter The Cloven Hoof, it has pieces like ”Law of the Trapezoid,” ”Erotic Crystallization Inertia,” and ”The Goodguy Badge,” i.e. real, substantial pieces of what has become Satanic ”scripture” wisdom, plus funny perspective changers like ”Hatha Toilet Seat Meditation,” ”Confessions of a Closet Misogynist,” and ”The Merits of Artificiality.” I love this book because it gives an insight into a truly creative and magical mind that continues to resound through well-formulated and entertaining words. I can only second Adam Parfrey’s introduction to the book: ”No other man has so well illuminated the shadow purpose of Western life in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
Hermann Hesse – The Journey to the East
A slim but powerful tale of the forces between the lines that guide you so that you can guide yourself. Hesse is an absolute master of telling these kinds of allegorical, metaphorical stories that so elegantly lift you up to see your own bigger picture. Whenever I read this book, I find new things – shouldn’t all of life be like that? A working title for this very book that you’re reading now was actually The Journey to the Beast & the Journey to the East. I love most of what Hesse wrote, but this tale has a very special place in my magical heart.
Carlos Castaneda – The ”Don Juan” Books
At first I accepted the anti-hype that Castaneda wasn’t ”for real” and that the books were all fiction and not in any way anthropology at all; the main criticism of course coming from academics. But when I started to penetrate his books – very much triggered and inspired by the notion that in the Jaqui native American mythos that Castaneda investigates, a ”man of knowledge” can absolutely also be a ”diablero” – I discovered that elation and inspiration can show up in many different ways. Castaneda manages to convey the ineffable potential through the very simple Don Juan stories and narratives, and he completely transcends notions like ”anthropology,” ”fact” or ”fiction.” What remains are punch-packing documents that can and will take you into new psychic zones if you only allow them.
Ben Hecht – Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath & The Kingdom of Evil
Journalist Ben Hecht had strong literary ambitions throughout his life, and his success as a Hollywood screenwriter often put a lid on these ambitions. However, before the Hollywood era really began for him, he wrote two uniquely weird tales of dark and morose madness, with psychosexual, pathological perversions and a whole lot of depressed deviations, formulated through the vitriolic rants of the protagonist Fantazius. Sometimes I wonder if somehow Hecht had read Austin Spare’s Anathema of Zos or The Book of Pleasure, or if the thematics and language were simply part of an avant garde Zeitgeist? In his purple parlor, Anton LaVey read to me from Fantazius Mallare, and I was then hooked and instantly formatted. Thank Satan! I can tangibly touch these inspirations in my own ”conceptual” writing such as the ongoing Mega Golem missives.
William Burroughs & Brion Gysin – The Third Mind
In the TOPY days, there was our own philosophy and magic in Thee Grey Book, and then there was Burroughs’ and Gysin’s The Third Mind: A book so influential at the time (and still) it literally cut up the narrative of contemporary magic. Ideas, explanations, suggestions, and techniques of cutting things up are mixed with examples in texts and images. The crystallization of their two separate minds into a uniquely creative Third one that still reads like fireworks in combatting the herds and their overlords, trying so desperately to control time and space. Brion Gysin ”touched hands” with Genesis P-Orridge and thereby transmitted this quintessence and more, and Gen later on touched mine. For me, therefore, this book in particular is a testament of that powerful psychonautic perspective that catapulted magical thinking far into the 21st century and embraced what Balzac and many others had already been sniffing: ”Chance is the greatest artist.” (Which leads on to the perhaps slightly paranoid question: ”How random is random?”)
Lao Tse – Tao Te Ching & Hua Hu Ching
Chuang Tzu – The Book of Chuang Tzu
I’ve clustered these great minds and their writings because to me, they are essentially the same. The influence of Daoism on the Western magical mind-frame is an exquisite antidote to the belligerent push-and-pullism of causal culture. Even Crowley, being clothed first in the ”old” and then in creating the ”new,” realized the futility of most of it, and had a great Dao moment while on a ”magical retreat” on an island in the Hudson River in New York in 1918. Paradoxes, light-heartedness, transcendence, being still, being silent, ”doing by not doing,” et cetera, et cetera. The most magic I’ve ever come across has been within Daoist ”contexts” (even that sounds like a paradox!). Its simplicity makes me laugh (and occasionally cringe) at how hard I fought with myself and the world early on to be visibly ”this” or ”that,” when in fact I had already been both this and that all along anyway. Sometimes the best magical mirror is a window, and vice versa.
Kenneth Grant – Outside the Circles of Time
For old times’ sake, I’ll throw in a Grant title here that was important to me once upon a time. Like Anton LaVey, Grant freely associates and syncretistically merges different ingredients into a tasty cosmic dish: there’s his friend Crowley & Thelema obviously, UFOs, Blavatsky, Spare (another friend of his), H.P. Lovecraft, and references to channeled messages from ”preterhuman,” ”discarnate" intelligences. A lot of it reads like occultnik boogie woogie fairytales to me today, but at the time Grant’s well written speculations did open a mind or two, including mine. Basically because he integrated concepts and notions that were really far out and took them seriously enough in his own creative mélange to interest others. Also, the fact that he could actually write changed everything. The proximity to science fiction, specifically, is what makes his work take off (into space?). A lesser writer could never have pulled off what he did, so kudos to him and his wife Steffi for their work devoted to connecting cosmic dots of a whole lot of dark hues, and in great style.
Austin Osman Spare – The Book of Pleasure
British artist-magician Austin Osman Spare wrote a few philosophical-cum-technical books on magic that still inspire me. Brought to the contemporary fore by Kenneth Grant, TOPY, and the IOT, Spare became an important cornerstone of the late 20th century occulturation, and has been rewarded with more and more overground attention since. The Book of Pleasure is a powerful manual containing an attitude and a meta-programming that are both fiercely unique, and this should really be the bedrock of any magician worth their salt. There’s deep psychology, sexuality, sardonic wit, as well as philosophy; plus Spare’s absolutely marvelous drawings, still seducing us into trying our own hand (and more) at creating sigils of desire and creating/curating psychic gardens uniquely reflecting ourselves. If I ever had to bring only one ”technical-magical” book to a desert island/lonely planet/black hole, Spare’s magnum opus would be it.
Aleister Crowley – The Book of Lies
I studied Crowley’s corpus diligently for over thirty years, and I still find him fascinating – occasionally. It is certainly not the novels nor the poetry that inspired me in the first place but rather the instructional books on the magic he knew so well. However, there are also a few real gems that transcend his two sides of megalomanic narcissist and devout teacher; one of these beingThe Book of Lies. Basically an anthology of short pieces in a humorous and poetic-mystical style, Crowley also confesses to his own weakness by trying to ”explain” these pieces on the opposing pages. Is it pathetic or brilliant?; redundant or clever?; mystical or perhaps magical? No matter what, I would argue – based on my reading and interpretation – that it’s all brilliance that contains considerably more truth than lies. The fact that the leader of the OTO at the time, Theodor Reuss, confronted Crowley with an accusation that he had exposed the central sex magic secret (and technique) in one of these pieces is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I can only say thank you, Theodor, and thank you, Aleister, because if all of that hadn’t happened viaThe Book of Lies, I would not have become a IX° OTO member, and I would most likely never have written this book.
To read more about books (and book-making, and book-writing) that have been important to me, please get Meetings with Remarkable Magicians – Life in the Occult Underground. Thank You. Vade Ultra!
(Photo of me in Egypt by Vanessa Sinclair.)
#meetingswithremarkablemagicians #innertraditions #occulture #vanessasinclair #carlabrahamsson
Glad to see I have some of your recommendations- and thanking you for your erudite comments! Spare is just bliss. I hope you also have the reproduction tarot cards and accompanying book published recently. A hot treat!