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Two New(ish) JMG Books
Mar. 18th, 2022 02:20 pm
I'm very pleased to report that two more books of mine have just been released. (I know, my bookshelves are overloaded too.) The first is an offshoot of my book The Celtic Golden Dawn. Back in the day William Gray, one of Dion Fortune's students, published a fascinating little book titled The Office of the Holy Tree of Life, in which he used his own highly idiosyncratic version of the Tree of Life as the basis for a sequence of prayers and invocations calling on each of the spheres and paths of the Tree. I worked with that volume for some years back when I was exploring Gray's Sangreal Sodality system, and found it extremely effective as a way of working with the Tree of Life.
It's always surprised me that nobody else picked up the same practice and applied it to any of the other occult systems of Cabala. Since leading by example is always the most effective approach, I worked up a set of comparable prayers and invocations for the version of the Cabala given in The Celtic Golden Dawn, worked with it for a couple of years, revised as needed, and then circulated it privately among members of the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, making more corrections as needed. Now it's in print and available from Aeon Books. You can order a copy here in the US and here elsewhere in the world.
The second book -- well, it's not new, but it's been republished in a new and improved edition, which almost counts. ;-) The Retro Future was the last of the books in what I suppose you could call my peak oil period, the years in which I was an active participant in the movement to try to get the industrial world to notice that the engines of economic growth were running on fumes. Yes, we failed -- and that's something I'll be discussing elsewhere, in some detail -- but if you take a look at the price of gasoline just now, it may start to sink in that we weren't wrong...The peak oil movement also helped a lot of us think outside the narrow limits of acceptable discourse in industrial society, and in particular to challenge the mythology of progress that provides the modern world with its unacknowledged official religion, and undergirds most of the superstitious thought about technology that's landed us face first in so many pitfalls in recent years. The Retro Future was the third and final book in my trilogy on that subject. The first volume, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age (available here), explored faith in progress as a religion and discussed what was happening as progress ground to a halt around us. The second, Retrotopia (available here), is a utopian novel set in post-United States America, in which a recently founded republic in the Midwest achieves prosperity and peace by abandoning progress and moving back rather than forward. The Retro Future, the capstone of the trilogy, discusses how to get from our current mess to a stable and relatively prosperous society by using the past as a resource for the future.
Scandalous? You bet. The blog posts where I originally floated these ideas fielded tirades from the offended; the book itself got uneasy looks followed by avoidance. Now The Retro Future is back in a new revised edition. As the price of gasoline heads toward the stratosphere, and the price of everything else climbs in lockstep, maybe it's time for another look at the alternatives. Interested? You can get it here.
Let's begin with the one that's likely to stir up the most discussion, debate, spluttering indignation, and blind rage. The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power is my book-length exploration of the occult dimensions of the Trump era and its aftermath. The Cthulhu mythos reference is of course deliberate; the history of the last five years has been shaped by the rise of squamous, rugose realities that sane, sensible, comfortable people thought were buried forever. Those of my readers who've followed my blogging through the last five years or so know a good many of the ideas I discuss in this book, but not all. It will be released in print and ebook formats in May. Interested? You can read about it 
Also in a tentacular vein, but considerably more lighthearted, is a project I've been working on for some time: The Weird of Hali Companion, an encyclopedia of the people, places, and (ahem) things that feature in my epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, and its four companion novels. Puzzled by sidelong references to the Kitab al-Azif? Not sure why a book by Zosimus of Panopolis was in Charles Dexter Ward's library? Wondering where you met Tom Gilman before that scene in The Weird of Hali: Arkham? Here's your guide. (It's also going to be a fine resource for the Weird of Hali roleplaying game, which is most of the way through the intricacies of production -- I expect to have an announcement to make in the not too distant future.) As a lifelong fantasy geek, I kept copious notes while working on my tentacle novels, and it seemed unfair not to inflict their gibbering horror on fans of the series. Interested? You can preorder copies in print and ebook format 
In the realm of graphic novels, meanwhile, I know many of my readers have admired (and purchased) copies of the two graphic adaptations of my stories "Winter's Tales" and "The Next Ten Billion Years" by Wormlamp Productions. I'm delighted to report that both of them are now available online from Comixology, the largest online sales venue for e-comics. Those readers who haven't been following my blogs since the dawn of time will want to know that Winter's Tales is a very capable graphic adaptation of a three-part story from the very earliest days of my former blog, The Archdruid Report, tracing a family's journey through three generations in the declining years of industrial civilization, with a slide rule providing the thread that ties the tales together. The graphic adaptation is by Marcu Knoesen and Walt Barna. You can get the digital comic 
10 Billion is based on a future-history vision from the later years of The Archdruid Report, adapted by Marcu Knoesen with art by Daryl Knickrehm You know how authors so often grumble about visual adaptations of their work? This is that rare exception, a visual rendering that's better than the original. With an original frame story and vivid imagery, it's astonishingly good. You can get the digital comic 
I'm delighted to announce that Founders House Publishers has just launched its Kickstarter campaign for Vintage Worlds 2 and 3, two new volumes of original short stories about the Old Solar System -- that is to say, outer space as it should have been, with swordsmen dueling along the banks of the Grand Canal on Mars, strange creatures slithering through the steaming jungles of Venus, and all the other details of the greatest shared fictional cosmos ever created by the human imagination. Both volumes are edited by Zendexor, the amiable host of 
Ascendant is the first of a projected series of anthologies on the subject of polytheist theology and philosophy of religion, published by Neos Alexandria, one of the liveliest of the current polytheist religious organizations. It's got essays by some of the leading lights of today's polytheist revival, wrestling with an assortment of Big Questions from the standpoint of belief in many gods. My essay, "The One and the Many: An Essay on Pagan Neoplatonism," takes issue with the common but mistaken confusion that sees Neoplatonism as monotheist, on the one hand, or monist on the other. I think it came out well, but it's far from the best piece in the book. If you're interested in the philosophical and theological dimensions of polytheism, this is not a book you'll want to miss. 
A Magical Education is the first of three anthologies of my talks and essays, published by Aeon Books. This volume includes nine of the talks I gave at a variety of Pagan and occult conferences between 2001 and 2010 -- specifically, the nine most popular talks, the one I was asked to give again and again. As a taster, here are the titles of the talks: 
