Magic Monday
Nov. 19th, 2023 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my fifth published book, The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic. I got tired of the torrent of wildly inaccurate books on herb and stone magic, and decided to write one based entirely on medieval and Renaissance sources -- granted, it helped that I'd gotten fairly good at reading Latin by the time I got to work on it. I wrote this before I studied hoodoo with Cat Yronwode, or it would have had much more traditional American conjure in it. It's still a solid book, and one I use myself whenever I need to look up the magical properties of an herb or what have you -- and it's the oldest of my books that's still with its original publisher, for whatever that's worth. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite bookstore if you live elsewhere.
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With that said, have at it!
***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Re: Qs
Date: 2023-11-21 02:00 am (UTC)With Charles XII, we see the same story. Similar to Hitler, he never married and insisted he was "married to the state". He had no children and it's not even clear he carried on any romantic relationships at all, if I recall correctly. Like Wotan, Hitler, and Arminius, he was not just the leader who revolutionized a new style of warfare, he then proceeded to fight a war with all of his neighbors, pushed too far, and then even till the end refused to negotiate, even when offered very favorable terms. In the end, he apparently recruited half of Sweden's male population to fight his wars, most of whom did not survive. The Swedish empire he created collapsed after his mysterious death. He was shot in the face with a musketball while leading from the front, and it's very possible that his own men shot him, who finally had had enough.
The problem with the Germanics, as we're seeing today, is that they are so hidebound to their current rule set that see even moderate reforms or rule-breaking as being the first step to total chaos. I've dealt with them. Good luck trying to convince them to lay off the unlimited immigration policies, or that maybe that they should lay off the Ukraine war and Russophobia just a bit. This means that the defects in their system just build and build until, well, the situation can't be salvaged anymore. And then Wotan appears. This is why they both fear and admire him, because he lives by his own set of rules and can create a new order, which they on their own cannot. A few years ago, some German comedians made a film where one of them dressed up as Hitler and went around Germany talking to people. Older people especially started to treat him as though he were the real thing, and said that they wanted him (Hitler) to come back. They vented their grievances about the current state of Germany with respect to the culture and migrants.
I apologize if this amounts to a hijacking blog post, so feel free to delete it. I've just had these thoughts for a while and saw an opportunity to express them.