Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is almost here, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.2 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week.  This was my sixty-first published book and my third anthology of short pieces, including all my best essays from my post-Hermetic period (the Hermetic essays were released earlier in my 2019 book The City of Hermes). It's probably the best one-volume introduction to the whole range of my ideas and interests, for anyone who wants to risk plunging down that N-dimensional rabbit hole.  It also includes my most widely cited essay, "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." On the off chance you're interested, copies can be purchased here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Heathen Beginner books

[forturso]

Full disclosure- I am a volunteer in The Troth, the current version of the organization that came from Thorsson's "A Book of Troth" that was recommended earlier. I will give my recommendation first, then my reasoning for doing so.

I would not recommend any of the above authors to anyone in the "100 level of Heathenry". I would recommend going to the local library and finding a translation of the Poetic Edda that you can digest (the vast majority of those I work with find Larrington to be the easiest read) and I would recommend volume 3 of the third edition of Our Troth - available in electronic format for USD 9 at lulu dot com. And then maybe later, Volume 2 (available electronically USD 10) and Volume 1 (same price)

Sadly, it will be nigh onto impossible to find any book that does not bring politics into it. As was suggested above, it is up to you to decide the degree of it you are okay with. I find the more porgressive ones to be easier to mentor with.

For similar reasons, I would not recommend Fire and Ice by Ryan Smith.

Now for the "why nots"-
beginning with Nine Doors- I would not recommend this to anyone in the first few years of a path, to begin with it is actually the fourth book in a series. The 3 previous books are necessary to properly do the work of the Nine Doors ( Futhark, Runelore, and At the Well of Wyrd) with "Futhark" being a *must have worked through* and the others a *good familiarity with*.(Introduction of the edition published in 1991).

Krasskova, Kaldera, Stinson, etc- (without getting into the socio-politics ) it is difficult for the reader (again I am discussing someone in the 100-200 level) to know what is UPG and what is drawn from sources. We should have reached a certain level of discernment first.

I admit I have issues with each of these author's stated viewpoints on stuff, but i do not have to agree with everyone and no one has to agree with me. Religion/ spirituality us such a personal thing that I really hesitate to state "you are doing it wrong" in personal practice- if we are discussing public stuff, then there is more room for discussion.

In Frith,
Strongbear

Re: Heathen Beginner books

[jprussell]

Fair enough, and thanks for the counter-points. I'm not familiar with the current version of The Troth nor Our Troth, so I can't speak to them and am glad someone else who can brought them up - I'll have to look into them for some broader perspective.

Also, fair point on the "pre-work" needed for Nine Doors of Midgard - I found my way into Heathenry via the Runes, so I had read and worked with those other books before checking it out, and I might have over-estimated the newcomer-friendlieness of NDoM's "on-ramp."

And the UPG point for Krasskova and Kaldera (not familiar with Stinson) is also fair - they could be clearer on what comes from their own experiences versus what's grounded in lore/archaeology/reconstruction. Personally, I've found the fact that they address the personal and experiential side of Heathen religious practice valuable enough to mostly be okay with that, but that's another place where my own prior more academic non-religious familiarity with the material might have given me some tools someone wholly new might not have, and so I might have not given it enough weight.

As for the socio-political stuff, yeah, I mostly also tried to steer clear of that, as I think it's largely distracting from finding a relationship with the Gods. Krasskova and Kaldera have some very strong views on those matters, obviously, and a lot of that is implicit in some of the material in their two books I mentioned, but I appreciated the way that the two books I mentioned laid out "here are things a lot of modern Heathens argue about that are tangled up in both religious and political things" without explicitly saying "and this is the right way" (at least as I remember it, it's been a couple of years since I read either). That strikes me as helpful for working out how much you might want to engage with or avoid such hot-button topics, and how to evaluate writers who have definite views on them.

Anyhow, as I said, thanks for providing the OP with a different opinion and some other options, I hope he or she finds it useful.

Cheers,
Jeff