Search Results for: dion fortune

Last month’s post, as I noted at the time, was meant as a backhanded introduction to magical training. That sort of introduction is necessary just now, because of a certain bad habit common among those who don’t know a great deal about operative magic. If, like me, you write books and give talks on magic,…

Lately I’ve been sorting through my collection of books on occultism and deciding which of them still need a place on my bookshelves. That’s a useful chore at intervals, if only because new books are always coming out and bookshelf space is regrettably finite; still, it has a little more importance this time around, as…

I really did intend to talk about something other than the vagaries of the Neopagan scene this month. The politics of contemporary Neopaganism deserved a passing glance, if only because those of us who are still practicing magic when the Neopagan wave flows back out to sea will have to deal with the social consequences…

I don’t think much of J.K. Rowling’s lumbering Harry Potter series. There, I’ve said it, and no doubt a tolerably large fraction of the readership of this blog will fling itself at their computer screens in a wholly reflexive attempt to wring my neck. Still, some dimensions of my reaction to that much-hyped series of…

I gather, from conversations I’ve had with occultists younger than I am, that few people who weren’t there at the time have any clear idea what things were like before the dawn of the occult boom that’s now fading around us. It really was a different world in those days, and not in any of…

I think most people with any kind of connection to the contemporary American occult scene have noticed by now that the great wave of pop Neopaganism that came rolling up the beach in the early 1980s, and crested right around the turn of the millennium, is flowing rapidly back out to sea. That should come…

The two previous posts on this blog will doubtless have occasioned a certain amount of frustration on the part of some of my readers. I can hear the distant muttering from here: “Okay, you’ve talked about Hiram Butler trying to become immortal by keeping his legs tightly crossed; you’ve talked about sex clubs dressing up…

It’s always struck me as rather odd that so many people think that occultism is inseparable from sex. The habit goes back a long way; the Jewish prophets, when they denounced their fellow Israelites and neighboring peoples alike for worshipping somebody other than the storm god of Mt. Sinai, routinely mixed accusations of sexual deviance…

I noted in a post earlier this year that although I greatly enjoy the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t find it spooky at all. I find his tentacled Elder Gods endearing rather than terrifying, and the vision of reality central to his fiction—the philosophy that Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has helpfully labeled “cosmic indifferentism,”…

Last month’s survey of sources of magical power in the Western tradition covered a lot of ground, and it’s probably going to be helpful to summarize before we proceed. Until the middle years of the nineteenth century, there were broadly speaking two major theories among operative mages about how magic works and where the power…