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The Reading List, Continued
Jan. 7th, 2023 01:43 pm
I have several more books in my get-to stack for these posts, and will get to them shortly -- well, in and among all my other projects! -- but here's one that definitely deserves a shout-out. Most of my readers will be familiar by now with the writings of Dion Fortune, aka Violet Mary Firth. Not many people are familiar with the writings of her teacher, the remarkable Dr. Theodore Moriarty. (No, not that Dr. Moriarty -- though I'm waiting for a Sherlock Holmes fanfic to make that equation someday.) Moriarty was the original of Fortune's fictional character Dr. Taverner, the hero of her occult detective short stories. (That's him below on the right, with two friends.) He was one of the least publicity-hungry British occult teachers of his day, and he never published a book during his own lifetime, but several book-length collections of his lectures were circulated in typescript among his students. Those have been hot properties in the occult scene for a good long time now. Fortunately some of his most important writings have just been published. Here's the blurb:
"Now available in print for the first time, The Mystery of Man by Theodore Moriarty.
"Theodore Moriarty (1873-1923) was Dion Fortune's first esoteric teacher, and is widely believed to have been the real-life inspiration behind the protagonist of her collection of short stories, The Secrets of Doctor Taverner. Approaching the centenary of his death, Holythorn Press is delighted to announce the first-time publication of The Mystery of Man, containing selected lectures from Moriarty's course for his private students as well as an extensive introduction by the editors."Covering Evolution, Anthropology, Psychology and Comparative Religion from an esoteric standpoint, these lectures are complex and profound, and will be of interest to students of Theosophy, Hermetics, Rosicrucianism and Esoteric Psychology. In addition, they are of special relevance to students of Dion Fortune and the Western Mystery Tradition.
"The detailed introduction by James North explains the background and context to Moriarty's philosophy, their connection with Dion Fortune's teachings and the question of their continuing relevance today. The editors have also endeavoured to correct the misinformation about Moriarty's biography and give a fuller account of the facts of Moriarty’s life, his work as an alternative healer, and his esoteric school."
Interested? You can get a copy here.
Having completed a couple of fairly demanding research projects -- the results in question will be published over the next two years -- I've finally had the time to catch my breath a little and start reading some of the pile of books that have come my way this year. A fair number of those may be of interest to my readers, so a few notes here seem like a good idea. 
The two volumes I want to talk about here are old favorites of mine, and are also among the works of his that show the most influence of his time with Maharshi. Meditation: An Outline for Practical Study is one of the few guides to the Western tradition of meditation I know of; it's a good solid book on the subject, and worth reading. I learned quite a bit by studying it back in the day, when you could get it (if at all) only in highly overpriced secondhand editions or from a good library system. Samadhi: The Superconsciousness of the Future and Ways to its Achievement is less practically oriented but it sets out the core ideas of Sadhu's Hindu-influenced Christian mysticism and provides the groundwork for most of his other books. 
I'm very pleased to say that I have a publisher interested in republishing out-of-print books from the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s. It's a good time for that; with petroleum well over $100 a barrel, inflation out of control, and a cascade of other economic and political crises making the current scene seem rather remarkably reminiscent of the 1970s, this is a good time for such a project. During the energy crises of that era, plenty of work went into constructive responses to the shortage of concentrated energy, and -- unlike most of what we've seen recently -- much of it focused on things you could build, make, or do yourself, rather than the sort of grandiose fantasy that only gargantuan corporations can do. 
Some of the subjects I have in mind are these: 
So I've been going through a lot of my older writings of late. A little while back Aeon Books, a recently established occult publisher in Britain, agreed to reprint my first two books, Paths of Wisdom and Circles of Power, and did a fine job with both; what's more, they proceeded to bring out a new edition of my translation of Gerard Thibault's Academie de l'Espee -- the sole surviving legacy of a Western esoteric martial art based on Pythagorean sacred geometry and Hermetic philosophy -- and did it right this time; so we've had a series of conversations about other projects, and that's sent me digging through old file folders and back issues of out-of-print magazines for things I wrote in decades past. 
A few weeks back, during a discussion of practical magic on this journal, one of my readers commented enthusiastically that I really ought to write a book on natural magic. I ended up in the somewhat embarrassing situation of having to explain that, well, actually, I'd already published one: The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic, which first saw print back in 2000. 
