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Some Items from a Reading List
Dec. 17th, 2022 02:46 pm
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. Mouni Sadhu's been a name I've mentioned rather more than once in my blogging, and for good reason. His real name was Mieczyslaw Demetriusz Sudowski. Born in Poland in 1897, he got involved in the thriving Polish occult scene after the First World War, and also studied in Paris with French occultists. After the Second World War he lived in Brazil for a while, then spent some time in India studying with the great Hindu teacher Sri Ramana Maharshi, before settling in Melbourne, Australia for the rest of his life. A lifelong Roman Catholic, he wrote a series of books on Christian occultism and mysticism that drew from Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as well as Hermeticism and Hindu traditions. Most of these have been out of print for many years, but that's now changing.
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. These are both valuable books, and I'm glad to have them in new editions, since my old copies long since fell apart through age and use. Both are now in print again from Aeon Books --
Meditation
Samadhi
-- and Aeon has also announced an even more welcome pair of Mouni Sadhu reprints in the works: Concentration, Sadhu's basic guide to mental training, and The Tarot, a hundred-lesson course in Hermetic occultism, building on the work of Eliphas Lévi and Papus. I wore out my copies of both books even before Meditation and Samadhi fell apart into stacks of loose pages, and it will be a very good thing to see them in print again.
I'm delighted to announce the reappearance of an occult classic: Theurgy: The Art of Effective Worship by Mouni Sadhu. 
To my mind Theurgy is the most important of his books, simply because it's the only English-language work known to me that presents the 19th- and early 20th-century French tradition of Christian theurgy in sufficient detail for practical use. (Theurgy? That's the practical art of invoking the divine to heal, bless, and protect human beings.) There's been a promising revival of Christian occultism in recent years, but what I've seen has mostly derived from medieval, Renaissance, and early modern sources; the material in Theurgy is different. It starts by outlining the theory of Christian theurgy, goes from there to basic theurgic prayer, then to more advanced practices, and finally to theurgic ceremonies. Like most of his later books, it assumes you also have access to Concentration and The Tarot, his two most famous books -- but I'm glad to say those will also be back in print shortly. 
