User Profile

Reverend Erik

arnemancy@grimoire.social

Joined 1 year ago

Moderator/admin of Grimoire.Social and the strange quark behind the Arnemancy podcast. A great lover of books. A collector of many strange volumes. Show me your spooky grimoires!

This link opens in a pop-up window

2024 Reading Goal

66% complete! Reverend Erik has read 8 of 12 books.

avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
Graham Harvey: Handbook Of Contemporary Animism (2013, Acumen Publishing Ltd) No rating

An incredibly wide variety of essays on animism, incorporating everything from new anthropological research to media criticism of anime. I probably shouldn't say this kind of thing, but every magically operant person ought to read it, if they can. A lot of the essays are available online now, so you can check out the ToC if you don't want to buy it, or can't of course.

avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
Jason Miller, Matthew Brownlee: Real Sorcery (Paperback, 2023, Weiser Books) No rating

Very good. Straightforward, and with noteworthy changes from the first edition. Most tellingly, Miller completely overhauled the "love and lust" chapter after realizing he didn't like traditional erotic binding spells and didn't want to be the one providing them for people.

His daily exercises have been a good foundation for changing my daily practices, and his specific spells look solid. The book's conceit of working with magic by performing mundane tasks is something I understood already, but it never hurts to be reminded.

avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
Geraldine Pinch: Egyptian Mythology : A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (2004) No rating

You're either interested in this topic or not, but if the question is whether this book is good at that topic, then yes, it is. It's very good.

It packs a lot of information into a quite short book.

It's in four broad sections. The first is an introduction and outline of Egyptian history. The second is a narrative "history" of Egyptian myth, beginning with the creation of the world and moving through the retreat of the goddess and the contention between Horus and Seth, and so on. The chapters here indicate how many different gods could fulfill the roles of each narrative event. The third section is an A-Z of gods, places, and groups, often filling in the narrative from the previous section. The final section is an extensive bibliography.

avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
avatar for arnemancy Reverend Erik boosted
Benebell Wen: Book of Maps: Revelation Edition (EBook) No rating

The Book of Maps is the companion guidebook for the Spirit Keeper's Tarot, a black …

Book of Maps (Wen)

No rating

I like this deck a lot. And the book is often necessary because cards will depict gods and historical figures that aren't necessarily recognizable in sight.

But the book sometimes gets its mythology wrong, refers to worrying ideas like theosophical Akashic records, and tries to brute force a thesis about prisca theologica that's as unnecessary as it is culturally flattening. The book will often talk about how "all cultures" do something that's factually untrue, like believing in "the light."

It does feature a more systematic mapping of I Ching trigrams to tarot cards, which was interesting. And much of the myth and history is still good.