There are a number of criteria, which I believe make an occult book useful and unfortunately many books fall very short of the mark. People might get upset as to why I review books poorly. They think I am being too harsh. I am actually just trying to demand a better quality of book from the Occult community. I am going to explain why books might have a poor review. I hope to convince any reader that actually these are important in books and they too should join me in demanding better books. The follow are all criteria, which I think are important in determining a good book. If a book doesn’t have these criteria I will rate it poorly and I hope others who have thought about this will do so as well.
Variety / New info
I began this website because so many people were reading the same books over and over again, but with slightly different flavours. There was little to take a student of the occult to the next level. They really lacked much variation or originality at their core. For an analogy let’s think about a chicken based dish. A chicken-based dish will be a lot of protein and some fat. The dish will mostly be the same nutritional value whether it is flavoured with garlic, lemon, lime, white wine sauce or BBQ marinade. No matter what the small amount of added flavour is, at its core a chicken dish is mostly chicken. There are nutrients in the stuff added, but in comparison to the chicken they don’t have huge effect on overall meal until you start really altering the chicken (less fat, more fat, white meat, dark). Occult books so often are like this … focusing on the same material over and over. They say well this is from a slightly different perspective … Green Witch instead of Kitchen Witch. Uck it’s the same and you’re just making up new things to trying and make a corner in the market to sell your drivel.
Repeating is not great. So often I pick up a book and half way through chapter 2, I can predict what the rest of the book is going to say. This lack of originality and variation means that I could read 1 book or 10 books and still end up with barely enough material for 2 books. I have a life to live, an involved magical practice, a job that requires regular CPD (Continual Professional Development), some demanding creative hobbies (such as performing on stage) and I try to exercise regularly. I do not have time to be reading the same shit over and over again. I do it anyway in the hopes that anyone who reads my blog won’t have to!
A good magical book will be different from other books already available on the market. It will contain different content or have a different purpose. It won’t just be the flavour that’s different it will have a different meat at its core.
Truth (and the levels of truth)
Magic has a long history. Some of the history is written, some is derived from art/story and some is inspired by art/story. Because there is a long history of practices, we can actually look at magical practices that have been done for thousands of years. Anyone who has been to the Baths in Bath, UK will see cursing paraphernalia and spells from Ancient Romans. We can look at how they did things and these practices which really work wonders! We can also get creative and make up our own personal ways of doing things. So there’s loads we can write about. Some has historical basis and some is inspired by art.
When we make up our own practices they often work for the person who made them up, but not necessarily another person. Personally with my limited reading time, I would like to focus on things, which have a historical basis. I can make up my own practices just as well as the next person and I often do. There are literally thousands of occult authors out there and if I tried learning all their made up practices, well, I would die before I had time to cover one tenth of them. I have limited time in my life. I would rather focus on real history and my own creativity, rather than another person’s made up stuff. There’s just too much made up stuff to cover it all and I would like my own creativity to be inspired by historical practices. Unfortunately, many authors don’t quite have the respect for history and historical magical practices that I do.
In the early days, modern Wicca was created by authors all plagiarising each other. One person made something up someone else copied it and said it was an ancient practice. Buckland would make up a knot spell and it would get copied by Scott Cunningham, Laurie Cabot and many more. Then the weird thing is when Buckland’s sources in the UK had never heard of this thing which he supposedly “was taught it by them” and was supposedly “ancient”. There was very little genuine history to the practices that were arising in 1960s-1990s, but they were still fun and if the practitioner was particularly psychic, they could basically make anything work. However I really don’t have the time to to study everyone’s creative adaptations. I will from time to time present my own, but I try to make it clear that they are my own creative interpretations to give you a clue that you also have the freedom change things up, or the freedom to ignore that part of my writing. Sadly bad occult books do not allow for this. Bad occult books often present what I call “Unverified Personal Gnosis” (unverified way that a person feels about something) as fact. I’ll ellucidate.
What do I mean by this. In Magic there’s multiple levels of “true”. A good book can distinguish between these levels of true in the way they phrase things. A good book might not use the same terms I use (“mythic truth”, “objective truth”, “UPG” and “VPG”), but a good book will be clear when it presents information where it got it from and therefore how it can be classified.
Mythic Truth
There is mythic truth which is essentially saying this is true to the myth shared by many people. This does not mean it is genuinely true, but it is part of a story we tell ourselves. For example Jason didn’t necessarily truly set out with the Argonauts and find the golden fleece, but there is a shared story retold thousands of times that he did. This is mythic truth in that it is true to the shared myth.
Objective Truth
There is objective truth which is we have found the remains of items which say on them that they are curses or which claim to curse other people, so it is objectively true that people have been trying to curse each other as far back as these curse paraphernalia go. This begins to require evidence.
Personal Gnosis (UPG and VPG)
We have personal gnosis, which is where a person has some kind of divine revelation that made them believe something to be true. For example someone could say “while trying to incubate, I had a dream that Hekate said she wants to be offered Liquorice Allsorts.” This knowledge (or gnosis) is personal. It isn’t relevant to someone who didn’t have that dream and someone else might not necessarily believe the dream to be inspired by Hekate at all. So suddenly this knowledge is very personal.
Now we might also have a Personal Gnosis that has a great degree of truth due to evidence. I called this Verified Personal Gnosis (or VPG). This is where personal gnosis is verified with reference to evidence. The most common examples are pastlife memories where a person find people with their supposed old names and houses which match a drawing they made years ago. Also it could be closer to the example before, imagine Hekate appears in a dream and says “worship me on a round altar”. Then the practitioner notes that in the Delphinion temple to Apollo there is a round altar for Hekate.
The Liquorice Allsorts revelation would be hard to prove since it is unlikely anything like Liquorice Allsorts existed during the time of a major Hekatean cult, so that could be classified as Unverified Personal Gnosis (or UPG). When you present information you need to think what reason do they have to believe me? If they have no reason to believe you then its probably UPG. Sadly many authors don’t recognise their own UPG when it crumbles to pieces in the face of evidence to the contrary. This leads to people who don’t want to admit they were wrong saying “well we all have our own truths” and finally recognising for the first time that there are different levels of “truth”.
A good occult book will be very clear on the face of it which of these levels of truth it is dealing with. It might not refer to it by name, but in a good book the author should be clear “I had a vision which suggested X” or based on this historical evidence Y is likely to be true. Z is part of the myths which were spoken about this deity in their orisons and hymns.
Authority
Okay this is a difficult one to measure. The average occult practitioner is not a member of some grandiose magical order of organised magical learning with the 10th degree and years under his belt. And frankly, they shouldn’t have to be! A lot of the members of those orders spend more time dealing with politics, then they do actually practicing magic. Also they are full of armchair magicians. I remember one person in a Thelema-based order who had learned and memorised many Thelemic texts and knew many of them inside and out, but he kept trying to push the leaders of the order to run the group in ways that failed to adhere to the most basic principles of Thelema (Do What Thou Wilt, reduce your time in your job so you can focus on doing what you really love). So well versed was in Thelemic texts, but he had taken none of them to heart.
One of the issues that I had when I was first starting out was people who were members of big orders putting me down because I was not in their order. Story-time. I remember when I joined the ranks of magicians there was a lot of respect for a version of the Lemegeton published as The Goetia by Aleister Crowley. The Goetia was kind of my starting place (after loads of energy work based magic). A lot of people that know of it, will say “whoa you jumped in at the deep-end”. I really did! Aleister Crowley had decided to begin this grimoire with an invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel (a sort of transcendental spirit guide) to help the magician have the authority to control the spirits summoned. But this was a complicated ritual and it contain complicated sigils and names. I had tried to look them up but I was coming up short and I made the mistake of asking online.
“If you’re not 5°=6□ in the A.’. A.’. then you have no authority to be doing that ritual! Stop!” Well I didn’t realise at the time that the A.’. A.’. still existed and I was definitely willing to take the appropriate degrees, but not from some douches online that wouldn’t answer a basic question. Most likely they would not answer the question because they did not know and they wanted to feel powerful and knowledgeable so they put other people down. I was at the precipice of gatekeepers of knowledge saying nope. I had asked some very specific questions. “What is are the Governor sigils for in the ritual and what action should the ritualist take when he reaches that point in the ritual?” and “Where did the names of the four Great Elemental Kings come from?” I could hear their whiny tones “If you don’t understand the ritual you shouldn’t be doing it.” I soon discovered that many of the initiates of the appropriate degree actually couldn’t tell you the answers to these questions because they have never bothered to find out. Instead of helping me, the people “of authority” called me foolish, told me I had no authority or permission and tried to stem my potential growth. Fuck them! I went and got the original ritual from the PGM, learned most of it in its original Greek (I have forgotten a lot of it now, but I can tell you what words I ended up correcting because they were made off a bad facsimile), my research into Enochian Magic finally yielded the answers to my questions (after years) and I had some incredible experiences with the ritual.
I was challenged. Without the appropriate degrees in a fancy order, I had still earned my authority to teach others about the ritual. Years later, when I was a member in the “appropriate magical orders”, I was often asked to speak about what I had learned because many people of the appropriate grade had not bothered to learn it and it was the quickest and easiest way to do ensure they did. I will however admit that 15 years later I still do not have the grade to be doing that ritual, because I was supposed to master certain yoga techniques and I will not allow myself to pass to the next grade until I have perfectly complied with the instructions once set in stone by the order’s original master.
In the time have been practicing magic I have joined Masonic orders (one that teaches this stuff and one that is a blue lodge), a recreation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the A.’. A.’. and a local coven. I have also participated in local pagan ritual groups, local pagan reading groups and been to many large conferences. Each experience presented me with many opportunities to learn and gather information. When I write about Occultism. It is something I know about and I am an authority on.
Sadly there are many people who have not bothered to do anything to make themselves an authority on magic. They maybe had a local coven, but did more knitting than ritual work. There are people who have been in many gatherings, but have no personal practice at home and they try to write books. There is a slight issue with writing without authority and I will explain.
Writing about magic with respect to history and research is difficult. It involves having to spend a lot of time learning, reading and using this to inform your experimentation. But think about it. In any other field wouldn’t you be required to spend at least 3-4 years studying before you could teach anything? Often the first piece of writing that gets published is your dissertation which is in the third year of studying and represents 6 months of research. You can’t be a physicist without cracking a text book. You can’t practice medicine without learning for 7 years. You shouldn’t even really be a painter without showing some respect for people like Monet, Picasso, Michelangelo, Dali and Rembrandt. Why is this required? Well in order to do something at a level where you can be an example for other people you need to be doing it well. You need to be doing it at a better level or at least doing it differently and have something to say about how it works when done differently. If Albert Einstein were to read a children’s book on physics he wouldn’t learn anything. It’s only books written by someone with more knowledge and experience than you that will actually challenge and grow you. So for a person to write a book that will challenge and grow other people well they need to be a few steps a head of them. They need to know what they are talking about. They need to be an authority on the subject of magic.
So why do we allow people to do this in magic? We let them be really lazy with history and what’s the result? False information presented as fact. Because people put forward their own UPG as fact and then other people who don’t know any better, copy them perpetuating falsities.
It’s the same issue with anti-vaxxers (I’m going to make myself unpopular with this next comment.) There is one person who has worked in medicine, seen the affect of many vaccines and spent years studying them. Another person has watched a couple of YouTube videos and now writes as if they have the same level of authority. The end result is falsities presented as fact. Suddenly, hundreds of people who read the false info are really scared. They’re scared about irreversibly hurting their children. And well, its their children, so they have a right to be protective! If the market was only full of good well-researched information presented by totally independent sources (sources that don’t rely on people spending money on medicine), parents might be able to be more confident in vaccines and their children could end up being better protected! This behaviour is currently ruining the health of our society, don’t let it ruin our spiritual health too. Demand that authors are clear about their truth and make them actually open a book and study and use that to challenge them to grow spiritually, before they write bogus.
Flights of Fantasy
Often authors who write a lot of unverified personal gnosis tend to be taking off in their own flights of fantasy. Magic has many realms for us to get lost in and fantasy is one of them. Think about Bastian in the Neverending Story (the book not the film) when he steps into Fantasia and becomes a handsome “oriental” boy he slowly loses his identity. This is a warning. I am pretty sure Michael Ende was a powerful magical practitioner and he was warning about the astral planes in the realm of yesod where we can get lost in reflections of our own desires and fantasies. If you don’t think Michael Ende was a magical practitioner then think about the name given to the Child-like empress, “moon child”. A book by Crowley about creating a human born with the soul of an ethereal being is called Moonchild. Also remember that in Thelema the initiator is Ra-hoor-khuit the crowned and conquering child is that not similar to the child-like empress? The similarities do not end there. Following a person who is lost in an astral plane is not going to be health for your magical health. Remember in the novel of the Neverending story, Bastian begins to lose his memories of the real world including his own name. He cannot escape fantasia without it. The astral realms are the same and they are a dark pit with little spiritual progression so watch out for following authors on their own flights of fantasy.
If an author cannot distinguish between these different levels of truth in something they are writing for other people, then it’s unlikely they distinguish between different levels of truth for themselves! Be very careful about following such people. They might have a good grasp of dream states, they might know a few astral planes, but they will probably struggle to go beyond this. There is a reason Eliphas Levi felt it necessary to commit an entire chapter to this subject (called the Astral Light) in his Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (Transcendental Magic published by A.E Waite). Understanding truth is important. In Thelema Truth is called Light. It is one of the 4 major rays of light that comes out of the new Aeon (along with Liberty, Love and Life). Naturally is has transcendental quality where the truth seems to reach a point where there is neither truth nor falseness, but without respect for it as its most crude level as manifest truth, the initiate will fail to grasp it at its origin in the divine. (See Book 150).
How did we get here? Well many occult books draw inspiration from art. Art reflects the fears of its audience and the culture in which the art was made. If the audience did not believe in powerful witches, then Circe in the Odyssey would not be a scary or respected character. However, because this is art, it has licence to stretch the truth a little bit. The character might not be intended to reflect a real perceived danger. She could simply represent the hear of the wilderness that the Ancient Greeks had taken to an extreme. It is also entirely possible that it represents a danger, which the audience does not even believe in at all! It is hard to say for sure, but if we are happy to watch Superhero movies in modern day when he do not really believe they exist, then it’s entirely possible the classical Greeks were happy to listen to an impossible story, if it were entertaining. So many Occult books draw from stories and trying to recreate in themselves archetypes for dramatic purposes and to have a REAL effect, so its not surprising when someone misses the point and hops onto the bandwagon without understanding why and joins in. But then that author did not quite get the memo that the rest of us are tapping into the archtype represented by the character in the story we are not actually acting like it existed in real time and space.
Technique not Dogma
It is worth noting that the Buddha gave a lot of information about the truths he had discovered by more than anything he focused on giving people the means to find out the same truth for themselves because he trusted in the universe in its ability to present the same truth to those that truly inspected it.
Why we get truth so wrong
Finally always remember how human beings judge truth. Aristotle wrote neatly about this. Before we become persuaded by an argument, we make three considerations. There are three stages where we might dismiss something. We consider the message itself (which he called the logos), we consider how the message makes us feel about the world (pathos) and we consider how much we respect the source of the message (ethos). Unfortunately sometimes an idiot is right. If we ignore someone because we think they’re an idiot then we might miss out on all the things they have to say that are correct. I mostly write this blog anonymously because I often give off a beta male vibes, when I am not in drag, so people see me as something to overcome, supress or correct. Therefore they don’t hear the content of my message. So by removing myself from it, the message becomes more powerful. Pathos can also led to us not accepting truth too. Remember it might feel nice to tell ourselves we are powerful sorcerers with the world in palm of our hand. Reading a message that challenges that might not be as comfortable to believe, so sadly many people don’t. This is where a lot of cognitive dissonance comes from. The most common issue… person A makes an ignorant statement. Person B points out how ignorant that statement was. Then person A doesn’t want to be seen as ignorant so they begin to defend their statement and not except anything they were just told no matter how true it is. You see how easily we can end up ignoring truth? I am not very good at this, but I try my best to focus on the logos. It’s hard work when an author is struggles with different levels of truth. So often I want to put a book down and I have like 5 on the go at once so its easy to forget about one altogether.
Simplification to the point of Inaccuracy
Many people like to write accessible primers. For many huge subjects like alchemy which are not homogenous or consistent. It is very easy to write something that might be true for a very small part of the subject, but not true for the rest of the subject. Think about Jung who’s writing on alchemy is based mostly on a single document called the Ripley Scroll. What he was writing about was a single document with very little actual text on it. It’s all pictures. Now think about how many thousands of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn initiates whose own knowledge of alchemy is entirely based on Jung. What they know is about 0.1% of the Western Alchemy knowledge available and it is mixed up with 80% psychoanalysis which post-dates the original order. Then many of them talk about their knowledge as if they know all about alchemy. It’s easy to get sucked into this trap.
Get it right
Write. By all means write. Tell me the truth. By all means tell the truth. Tell me your own made up creative ideas. By all means tell me your own made up creative ideas. But label them appropriately, so I can decide for myself what is true for me.
Simplify things for other that’s great and makes it accessible, but always leave notes that show just how vast and complicated the actual field is.
Be like the Buddha, present how you got the truth, then if it really is true, you can be confident other people will reach that same truth that you did.
Purpose
A book should have a well defined purpose and should really stick to it. Too many books are written for the secret purpose of making the author seem like they have something to say. Often this is because the author is insecure. After years of reading the same invariable books over and over again, they actually has very little to say and so they need to fluff up their ego. End result = a book of fluff with very little content and certainly nothing new.
If however someone says “well people are finding this subject inaccessible” so I want to write a primer. That’s great! So long as the book actually works as a good primer. Show people that this is door into something. But please, please, please show how vast the subject is. Giving a small peak into something vast an inaccessible is a great reason to write a book. But many people do a disservice when trying this. Something which is a primer that takes a huge subject and present it as a pamphlet often has a negative effect. It leaves people thinking they know everything when they really just read a pamphlet. That is also a problem. This is often the case with alchemy and I had this issue with Earth Alchemy. That author did not know the second thing about alchemy. So many people want to talk about alchemy and well they can’t name a single alchemist except for Hermes Trismegistus and Nicholas Flamel. Also they haven’t read anything written about alchemy prior to 1900 and often they involve bastardised ideas from the Indian Tantrika spiritual systems called chakras due to lack of information on actual western alchemy. Again this is because of how quickly people end up writing bogus because they think they know the entirety of a magical system when they have barely grazed the first thing. This is another potential for poor truth.
So stick to your purpose. If it’s a primer it’s not meant to cause false information. It is meant to introduce. Maybe you have a very philosophical subject which you want to make more practical or a very practical subject which would benefit from some philosophy.
Perhaps like me you like the idea of collecting together into one place a variety of different pieces of information from many different sources. I like to do this with grimoires. I must have about 20 of them on my shelves and well most people don’t have access to so many. Also if I wanted to figure out what spirit are associated with Mars across all the grimoires then I don’t want to have to read all 20 of them from cover to cover to do that. The organisation makes it easier to spot information.
Another purpose might be translation. A book could only be available in German or French and you want it accessible to English speakers. Again stick to the purpose don’t add or take away. By all means comment on the translation, but stick to your purpose of making this German volume accessible to English speakers.
Manipulation
Manipulation is a dirty word. It sounds bad. Not all manipulation is. When I coach other people whether it is life coaching, spiritual coaching, job coaching or coaching them in their drag art I AM manipulating them. However I am doing it in a setting where I have their permission to do it, I am doing it in a way they are aware of it and I am doing it to help them reach their own goals.
Even as I write this article I am trying to manipulate you. I am trying to get you to think about what makes a good occult book and start demanding better quality books from the authors. Why do I do this? Because I want to manipulate our culture to have better quality books. I also want to manipulate authors to write better books.
There’s too many occult books which manipulate wrong. They stroke egos. One ritual done the reader strokes their own egos saying now reader you are a powerful dark mage that can summon the elements, while in reality they can’t summon a pizza from the local kebab shop through the medium of Uber Eats. Please we live in world where many energy workers don’t have the energy to get up in the morning, make healers seem to be perpetually sick and on the verge of tears and many witches have lives falling apart because they all told themselves I’m very special, I can ignore all my problems now.
Good writing should manipulate others. But it should do it for the bettering of the field and it should do it in an obvious way. It should be a call to action not to complacency. I am calling you to action now. Calling upon you to demand better books. Challenge authors. Stopping letting twats become occult celebrity without them having to work for it. It’s not fair on you the reader and its not fair on the occult community at large! A real magical practitioner is often going places. Some people cannot believe it when I tell them I speak 6 languages can read a bit of 3 dead ones, program a computer, read legal documents, fit in kung fu, drag performances, magical practice and still have time for friends and family, but I do because my life is magical. Okay I will admit it… I do burn out a bit sometimes (often when trying to submit tax returns). But I am the god of my own life. I have seen myself go from broke to solvent, to an owner of property which is mostly paid for by others with a few good pension investments. I have seen myself go from a demanding job to a relaxed on which lets me work on my art. I have seen myself grow others in their capabilities and confidence around me. I have made the discarded feel like they have a home and family. I have helped people out of crises. I didn’t get here by patting myself on the back and saying “There! There! You’re a powerful witch, you just wank and sleep now and your life is complete.” I got there because I know real magic and it flows through my body invigorating me, waking me up. I got here because I kept invoking my own god-like power. I didn’t just sit around in complacency.
Manipulate your audience, but do it for their betterment. Also do it in an obvious way. The point of making it obvious is to get consent. If you don’t like my intro where I say I am going to try to convince you to demand better books from the authors you read was so that if you don’t want to be manipulated this way then you can just stop reading there. Consent criteria fulfilled.
Efficiency
Okay this is something I fall short of! I am guilty of inefficiency, mostly because I am normally typing at the speed of light, trying to pull all my thoughts together and often I am writing articles over multiple days, so I forget I already wrote something and repeat myself. Sometimes I even repeat myself too. Like I said before, I have limited reading time. If you can convey something to me efficiently without over simplifying and without making a vast and variable subject seem like a simple homogenous one, then I am going to be very happy with the book.
Demand Better Books!
In order for me to decide something is a good book it has to meet all these criteria and do it well. If you’re an author please think about these things. If you’re a consumer start questioning before you recommend a book to someone does it actually do these things?
A good book should be something that hasn’t been written before or at least not in this level of depth or quality. It should show respect for the truth, recognise different levels of truth, avoid flights of fantasy and over simplification. It should have been written for a clear purpose. It should be clear about how it is manipulating its authors and manipulate them for the betterment of the community and their lives. Extra points if it can be efficient in communicating.