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@arnemancy rip u

truly i just want to manage one book a month.

will try to get a review out soon, i was just rushing to finish it before the end of the year!

This is an excellent book, a very quick read especially considering it's about legal challenges faced by members of ADRs (African Diaspora Religions). The legal persecution (on top of the social othering) of these marginalized religious practices is horrific a continues to this day. My one (soft) critique is that the author emphasizes that these are religions -- as antithetical to 'magical practices'. While I appreciate that, this is a deeply problematic position for those who do maintain magical practices, particularly people of color. The result of this approach is that "if you are BIPoC, you can practice religion, but you can't practice magic" which further stigmatizes magical practice (and the difference between magical, religious, and spiritual practices is functionally nebulous. I'd suggest a better legal argument (that would solve a whole ton of problems in the U.S.) is simply, "My body: my rules."

@arnemancy and, bonus, you don't give any money to JMG!

@aversatrix @Heatherfreeman We are the Israels Regardie of our time!!

@Heatherfreeman @arnemancy well it's not #occult anymore, now that it's a searchable fucking hashtag. way to ruin the mystique!

This was such an incredibly transformative book for me. While it was written with a practitioner audience in mind, I really think this would be a superb text for anyone engaging with gender and sexuality in deeply personal and creative ways. It illuminated things for me in a way I'd understand "academically" before. And as I read it, I began to understand things in a deeply personal, magical, and spiritual way. This book is a treasure and a gift.

thanks to Heather Freeman's podcast for bringing this to my attention!!

The introductory polemic is superb; i wish the author would read it and reconsider his support of people derided as "fascists" and "transphobes", and rejoin the actual left. But the amount of binary, cissexist thinking throughout the rest of the book suggest that he won't. Nevertheless, it has a few great ideas, and the writing is beautifully florid. Pirate it.