User Profile

Calliope

calliope@grimoire.social

Joined 11 months, 3 weeks ago

Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies, professor, diviner, writer, trans, nonbinary

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2024 Reading Goal

27% complete! Calliope has read 18 of 65 books.

Sakaomi Yuzaki, Caleb Cook, Philip Christie: She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, Vol. 3 (2023, Yen Press LLC) No rating

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.

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.

Jason Miller: Advanced Planetary Magic (EBook, Jason Miller) No rating

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.

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.

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.