occult/library

this page is still a work in progress. don't mind the filler text.

welcome to the library. i've read, watched and listened to a lot of occult nonfiction in my quest for arcane knowledge. the small portion of that i would actually recommend to other people is housed here. feel free to have a browse along the shelves.

foundational works

how to study magic

the only book i think really gets it when it comes to beginners. in the modern world, where the doors to a hundred paths lay open before you, don't rush to pick a cosmology to believe in or a god to worship or a group to join. get equipped with the meta-skills to think critically about what you're seeing and take a taster course, courtesy of this book. sarah's stance on gentiles engaging with kabbalah is overly soft in my opinion, but she also calls celtic mythology "wakanda for white people" which is pretty funny.

practical polytheism

a four-part series on how historical polytheist religion functioned, mainly focused on the greeks and romans. it shows the gods as powerful, influential and fully immanent members of one's community that you must build positive relationships with for practical, material gain. as a warlock, this is a way of working that is very familiar to me. speaking of, bret's post on how oaths work is also very good.

temple of the cosmos

an exploration of ancient egyptian philosophy by a philosopher, not an egyptologist. i don't think he's always correct about how the ancients percieved their own world, but i think it contains useful frameworks for us in the present. most of all, it reminds us that kemeticism is not an indo-european religion. reading this is an important exercise in stepping out of the preconcieved notions about divinity we've picked up from the culturally christian and new age zeitgeist.

cailleach's herbarium

perspectives on real scottish folk practise by a real scottish folk practitioner. you might not learn anything you can use in your own practise from this. what you will learn is how locational scottish folk magic is, how much neopaganism pillages from us, why actually liking the celtic gods is weird to me, and what ancestral magical practises look like when we don't discard the last thousand years of them for being 'tainted' by a christian superstrate.

real zen for real life

a frank and well articulated introduction to zen buddhism for anglo and culturally christian westerners. a good blend of history, theory and practise, it spends exactly as much time on all the topics as it needs to. i found buddhism very inaccessible and vague previously and this helped make it slightly less so. i recommend watching one video a day, as i did.

kemetic

coming soon...