Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies, professor, diviner, writer, trans, nonbinary
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Sturgeon's last book. A very deliberately sexual take on a new coming of Christ into the world, and what it would look like as people from a variety of backgrounds encounter the embodiment of godhead and those eho have encountered it.
CW: sexual assault, people having sex with traditional total lack of education
A very good book with some small moments that made me twitch.
So it's a tarot book that doesn't sit down and run through all 78 cards, telling you the meanings. I wish we had more books like this. This particular book is inventive and playful, drawing both on esoteric traditions of tarot and the simple fact that we're looking at playing cards here.
At its core the book is about exploring different means we can draw information and wisdom from tarot, founded on the idea that the tarot is "the instrument of our wisdom."
There's a little more gender essentialism than I expected from Rachel Pollack, but from what I understand, this is a revision of a book first published in 2002.
There's also an understandable but unfortunate -- for me, probably not for you -- tendency to use Pollack's deck she made, and I don't like it …
A very good book with some small moments that made me twitch.
So it's a tarot book that doesn't sit down and run through all 78 cards, telling you the meanings. I wish we had more books like this. This particular book is inventive and playful, drawing both on esoteric traditions of tarot and the simple fact that we're looking at playing cards here.
At its core the book is about exploring different means we can draw information and wisdom from tarot, founded on the idea that the tarot is "the instrument of our wisdom."
There's a little more gender essentialism than I expected from Rachel Pollack, but from what I understand, this is a revision of a book first published in 2002.
There's also an understandable but unfortunate -- for me, probably not for you -- tendency to use Pollack's deck she made, and I don't like it very much. I'm sure the black and white reproductions aren't doing the deck any favors, though.
She draws on Kabbalah including actual Kabbalah, like, you know, midrashes; she also draws on Egyptian myth, astrophysics, and Hindu practice. The latter is perhaps a little too poppy, but still better than many.
The astrophysics bit is also better than you'll see in nearly every other work on occult topics.
A nice expanded lwb essentially. The book goes through both de Gebelin's and de Melletcs lives and essays, briefly, before turning to describing the cards. Place used Aluette cards for inspiration when de Mellet didn't describe their meanings, as he concluded that's where de Mellet got his pip meanings in the first place.
It ends with a nice, succinct description of how to use de Mellet's divination method, including notes on how to deal with the inconsistencies.
If you get the deck -- and it's lovely -- definitely get the book as well.
They're lesbians Harold.
In all seriousness, this series is great. The author is even involved in an organization in Japan agitating for marriage rights for all, and promoted it unabashedly in the book.
The basic premise is two lesbians who haven't realized it yet fall im love over their shared love of food. And also there's trauma, well handled -- new characters in volume 3 include a loud and out asexual lesbian and a young woman suffering from trauma related to eating disorders. The chapters that hit heavy begin with trigger warning in fact.
Excellent book, clear and well organized. Some annoying personal biases will leave you rolling your eyes but they never get worse than the tradition he's drawing on.
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.
This 62 page book is designed to take your planetary work to the next level. …
Nice chapbook sized ebook sold direct on Miller's site. It needed a copy editor, but there's only one spot where the errors could interfere much: "Mercury" is in one place substituted accidentally for "Mars" but if you follow the repeating sequence in the Calls chapter you'll not be confused.
I'm not sure there's much specifically about "healing" as the description says, but what's here is good.
It has a section on "seed syllable" style use of Greek vowels mapped to the planets, a Heptasphere ritual to connect the practitioner to the seven planets, and 49 short spells mapped to the interplay of planetary hours and days.
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.
Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, …
You'll want to read this one. Charles Kingsley meets Innsmouth, though with that hardnosed insistence on only what it's reasonable for baffled people to learn, as Harrison always insists on. It reminded me a lot of Course of the Heart
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.
The Book of Maps is the companion guidebook for the Spirit Keeper's Tarot, a black …
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.
I think Farr may have been one of the people in the Golden Dawn who actually knew what she was talking about. This is a collection of her essays on magic and the like, though inexplicably the editor also included her "calendar," a booklet with a literary quotation for every day of the year. It's a waste of space. Aside from that, though, the essays are stimulating, interesting, and incisive, even if I don't agree with every bit of every one of them.
