thinking_turtle

A list of books published by John Michael Greer, as mentioned in Magic Monday. Suggestions and corrections are welcome!

#	Title	Image	Year	System	url	Remarks
1	Paths of Wisdom		1996	Golden Dawn	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my first published book, Paths of Wisdom., which originally saw print in 1996. It's an instructional manual of the Cabala, one of the core philosophical systems of the Western occult tradition, in the form that I first learned -- the version taught and practiced in the Golden Dawn tradition. I intended it to be for beginners, but in those days I had somewhat expansive ideas of what beginners in magic could handle! Now I'd recommend starting with a simpler book such as my Learning Ritual Magic before going on to this one. (If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US and here if you're anywhere else.)
2	Circles of Power		1997	Golden Dawn	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my second published book, Circles of Power, first published in 1997. It started out as a chapter on Golden Dawn magic in my first book, Paths of Wisdom, but quickly outgrew the space I'd allotted to it and became a book on its own. The first publisher, despite being a major player in the occult scene, didn't have a single editor on staff who could read the Hebrew alphabet, and so the original edition was riddled with errors; fortunately those got corrected for the second edition, and then further corrections went into this third edition. Like Paths of Wisdom, it's not really for beginners, but if you've worked through some more basic volume such as my Learning Ritual Magic this will take you a great deal further. (If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US and here if you're anywhere else.)
3	Inside a Magical Lodge		1998	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my third published book, Inside a Magical Lodge. This was my first really original work of nonfiction; Paths of Wisdom and Circles of Power were both attempts to present the Golden Dawn system of Cabala and ceremonial magic respectively in a clearer and more user-friendly form than existing books had managed, but this one broke new ground; there's still nothing else like it in print. In the years before I wrote it I'd joined the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, an old-fashioned fraternal lodge, and realized that huge amounts of classic magical technique assumed that you had a lodge background -- which next to nobody has these days. So I set out, between the covers of a single book, to explain what lodges are, how they work, and how they can be put to use by aspiring mages. It's one of my better books, though it badly needed the revision I gave it when it got its new edition a few years ago. Like all the books I consider my best, its sales were decidedly modest. Still, it found an audience, and I still hear tolerably often from people (most of them Freemasons) who find it extremely useful for making sense of the old but still functional toolkit of traditional lodge practice. (If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US and here if you're anywhere else.)
4	Earth Divination, Earth Magic		1999	Geomancy	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my fourth published book, Earth Divination, Earth Magic. This was the first of two books I've written so far on geomancy, an intriguing form of divination using sixteen four-digit binary numbers -- okay, they're combinations of one and two dots, but the mathematics are binary. It was one of the most common methods of divination in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but dropped almost entirely out of use thereafter, and important parts of the system got lost. I had to learn Latin and find a couple of rare texts --one of which is translated in this book -- to figure them out. This book originally came out from one of the big Neopagan publishers, and their marketing people apparently didn't bother to read it; they pushed it on Pagan bookstores claiming that it was some sort of Wiccan feng-shui, and of course most of the copies got returned to them. It was the first of my books to go out of print. Fortunately it (and my other book on geomancy -- that's a story all by itself, which we'll get to in due time) found their audience despite the misplaced efforts of its original publisher, and it's now selling steadily with a different press. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US and here if you're anywhere else.)
5	Encyclopedia of Natural Magic		2000	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my fifth published book, The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic. I got tired of the torrent of wildly inaccurate books on herb and stone magic, and decided to write one based entirely on medieval and Renaissance sources -- granted, it helped that I'd gotten fairly good at reading Latin by the time I got to work on it. I wrote this before I studied hoodoo with Cat Yronwode, or it would have had much more traditional American conjure in it. It's still a solid book, and one I use myself whenever I need to look up the magical properties of an herb or what have you -- and it's the oldest of my books that's still with its original publisher, for whatever that's worth. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite bookstore if you live elsewhere.
6	Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings		2001	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my sixth published book, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings. These days books on investigating reports of monstrous entities are all over the place, but that wasn't the case in 2001, when this first saw print. I happened to be doing a lot of investigation of certain entities in the Puget Sound area in the years just before then; I thought it would be interesting to get some of my experiences and ideas in print; the book was a pleasant project to write, and it sold like hotcakes -- and, er, I may have some very small share of responsibility for those books on sparkly vampires, because unless you happened to spend time in the stacks of old university libraries full of mostly forgotten anthropology publications, this was for some years the one place in print you could find out that there's a very lively werewolf tradition among the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington -- you know, near Forks. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and here if you live elsewhere.
7	New Encyclopedia of the Occult		2003	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my seventh published book, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I'd gotten irritated about the lack of decent reference works on occultism, and Llewellyn, the publisher I worked with in those days was enthusiastic about the idea of helping to fix that. It was a fun project, and includes a certain number of quiet and rather abstruse jokes; there are other occult encyclopedias available these days but this one still stands up fairly well -- though I'd make a lot of changes if the publisher was interested. (This also turned out to be the last book I did with Llewellyn for a long while, due to some issues involving their treatment of another project of mine.) If you're interested in the encyclopedia, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue if you live elsewhere.
8	Learning Ritual Magic		2004	Golden Dawn	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is my eighth published book, Learning Ritual Magic. This is the first project I did with other authors, and it came about in a somewhat roundabout way. In the years just before this appeared I was involved in founding and running a magical lodge in the Seattle area, and the lodge had a study course for prospective members to work through. When the lodge folded -- yeah, it was the standard political problems that afflict such groups, which I hadn't yet learned how to forestall -- the three of us who were senior members, who'd written the course, decided to publish it as a book. It turned out to be a solid introduction to Golden Dawn-style ritual magic, and makes a good first step before tackling Circles of Power or any other more advanced test. If you're interested in the book, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue if you live elsewhere.
9	The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth		2006	Druid	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is my ninth published book, The Druidry Handbook. This marked a major turning point in my writing career as well as my spiritual path. In 2002, after several years of searching, I finally managed to make contact with the surviving members of the Ancient Order of Druids in America; I became a member in the spring of 2003, and at the winter solstice of that year was pitchforked into the hot seat as seventh Grand Archdruid of that order. The thing it needed more than anything else, in order to survive, was new members; a new website and some online publicity seemed to be helping, but I figured a book wouldn't hurt, and set out to communicate the basic ideas of the Druid Revival to readers. It saw print in 2006 and was the first book of mine to really hit the big time in terms of sales and popularity. If I had to do it over again I'd write a different book, but this one certainly did what I wanted it to do, and it's got a lot of enthusiastic readers; the cover I've posted here is the current edition, which is part of the Weiser Classics series. If you're interested in giving it a read, you can order a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue if you live elsewhere.
10	World Full of Gods		2005	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my tenth published book, A World Full of Gods. After I finished my Druid studies with the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) I decided to look into some of the other Druid organizations out there, and before I finally landed in AODA, I spent a while in Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF), at that time the largest American Druid organization. It was a very mixed experience -- the ritual and religious aspects of the organization had a lot of potential but the organizational structure was far and away the most dysfunctional I've ever dealt with -- but among the benefits I got out of my couple of years in ADF were a sustained encounter with polytheism and a conviction, which remains to this day, that polytheism offers a better explanation for religious experience than either monotheism or atheism. This book was the result. It tries to present the case for polytheism in terms that will make sense to readers who are interested in religion but not necessarily up to their eyeballs in theological or philosophical jargon. It took me quite a while to get it published, but it finally found a home with ADF's own small press, and now has a new home (and a revised and expanded edition) with Aeon Books. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.
11	Academy of the Sword		2006	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my eleventh published book, my translation of The Academy of the Sword by Gerard Thibault d'Anvers. There's a long and rather tangled story behind this book; I found out about it while doing research into Renaissance sacred geometry, went looking for an English translation, discovered that there wasn't one (and nobody had paid the least attention to Thibault in three hundred years), and decided to translate it myself, using a microfilm copy from the British Library as raw material. It took most of a decade, and much of it was done sitting on Seattle public transit -- I still have the notebook, and I'm amazed at times that I was able to read my own writing. I published the first eight chapters as a self-published spiral bound photocopy edition, and that got such an enthusiastic response that I went on to finish it; the first publisher, Chivalry Bookshelf, brought it out and went broke a few years later, and it took some years before Aeon Books brought out the current edition. en gardeWhat is it? A complete training course in rapier fencing based on Renaissance sacred geometry. It's the longest and most elaborate treatise on swordsmanship ever written, and one of the strangest, but I have it on good authority that the techniques work exceptionally well in practice -- yes, there are people who still practice old-fashioned rapier fencing. (The image on the right shows two of them working through the opening steps of one of Thibault's techniques.) If you're interested in this oddest of my books, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here if you're elsewhere.
12	Pagan Prayer Beads		2007	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is mine only to a limited degree. Most of it was the work of my wife Sara under the pen name she used then, Clare Vaughn. We sent it to the publisher with the authorship as "Clare Vaughn, with John Michael Greer." The publisher used to make a big deal about being feminist, liberated, etc. -- but somehow that didn't extend to giving a female author the credit she deserved, at least in this case. So my name got put first, where it didn't belong. (We also had to deal with a sustained attempt by an editor to sandbag the book; turned out the editor had a friend who was writing a similar book, and wanted ours to fail.) There are reasons I haven't placed anything with that publisher for years. Nonetheless, Pagan Prayer Beads came out very well. Yes, it's about exactly what the title suggests: how to design, make, and use prayer bead strands and rosaries for the deity or pantheon of your choice. The publisher's kept it in print, too, which is more than I can say for some publishers; if you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the United States and at your favorite book retailer if you're elsewhere.
13	Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies		2006	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is my thirteenth published book, and the first one that wasn't really my idea. It so happens that at that point in my life I needed money; I did a working with that in mind, and promptly got contacted by HarperCollins out of the blue. They'd had somebody lined up to do an encyclopedia of secret societies, but their intended author failed to produce; they needed a manuscript in a hurry and were willing to pay quite a chunk of change for one; and one of the acquisitions people had gone into a bookstore, and spotted two of my books, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult and Inside A Magical Lodge, side by side on the shelf. So I got the job, and the money, and I was happy. It was a fun project but the experience got me thinking that it was a good idea to stay away from big publishers. The book's not currently in print, and since it's a big publisher, getting the rights back would be a bear; if you really want one, you can find it on the used market pretty easily.
14	Druid Magic Handbook		2008	Druid	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is my fourteenth published book, and my first book on ritual magic that wasn't basically a rehash of what I'd learned as a Golden Dawn practitioner. The Druidry Handbook, my ninth book (and one of my bestsellers), didn't talk about magic much -- its purpose was to help people make sense of Druid nature spirituality, which can be related to magic but doesn't have to be -- and I got a lot of questions from Druids, and people interested in Druidry, who wanted to know how to practice magic in a Druid context. This was my first answer. (We'll get to the others.) Looking back on this project, I'm pleased by it; it sets out a straightforward course of magical training and seems to work well for many students. It's still very much in print, and you can get a copy here if you live in the United States and at your favorite bookseller if you live elsewhere.
15	Atlantis: Ancient Legacy, Hidden Prophecy		2007	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my fifteenth published book, and it's the one book of mine that I've allowed to go out of print permanently. The publisher who brought out Monsters was interested in other books in the broad paranormal-weird stuff end of things, and the Atlantis legend was an obvious topic; unfortunately the result was rushed, and not really well thought out. Someday I want to do a proper book on the Atlantis legend, and more generally on the tradition that there were entire cycles of advanced civilization in the distant past -- but this is not that book, and I'm somewhat embarrassed by it.
16	Long Descent		2008	Peak Oil		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my sixeenth published book, it's the first thing I published that wasn't on occultism, and it's also the first book I wrote that wasn't my idea. In 2006, as some of you will remember, I started blogging, and my weekly posts soon started focusing on peak oil. The next year, a Canadian publisher -- New Society Publishing -- contacted me out of the blue and inquired about whether I would consider writing a book on peak oil. Not only did I consider it, I hammered one out in short order, and The Long Descent duly appeared in 2008. That and the blog I had then, The Archdruid Report, launched me into a world I'd never expected to enter -- the world of professional activism and crisis-themed think tanks -- from which I extracted myself early in the next decade. It was a wild ride and a rather educational one, not always in a good way.
17	The Fires of Shalsha		2009	Novel 1		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my seventeenth published book, and the first novel of mine to see print. Fiction was my first love as a writer, but I happened to start trying to get into print about the time the market for original science fiction and fantasy started contracting sharply, and I spent a long time trying to find a publisher for any of it. The Fires of Shalsha's rather eccentric plot and setting didin'g help, as it's not in any of the standard subgenres of SF; it's a quirky science fantasy novel set on a colony planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani, and the setting and story were heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa samurai movies, Ursula Le Guin's political science fiction, and a lot of research on my part into martial arts, planetary ecologies, and human psychology. That apparently wasn't to the taste of editors. I wrote the first draft in the late 1980s and couldn't get it into print. Two revised drafts, one completed around 1992 and the other around 2000, had no more luck. It found its first publisher, a tiny firm in Everett, Washington, in 2008, and sold so few copies that I can't find an image of the original cover online. The picture here is of the second edition, which came out from Founders House in 2015 and did considerably better. It's currently out of print but will be out in a third edition from Aeon later this year.
18	Art and Practice of Geomancy		2009	Geomancy		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my eighteenth published book, and it happened via a chain of accidents that still has me fielding baffled questions. Here's what happened. My first book on geomancy, the fourth book I published, was released by a certain rather clueless publisher. I warned the marketing people there that they needed to make sure that their sales staff didn't get confused and think that it was a book on Wiccan feng-shui. Sure enough, their sales staff got confused and marketed it to all the little witch bookstores that thrived in those days as a book on Wiccan feng-shui. Once they got their copies and found out that it was a book on a somewhat fussy Renaissance method of divination, of course, they shipped their copies back to the publisher with irate letters; as a result, Earth Divination, Earth Magic became the first book of mine to go out of print. Fast forward to 2008. Hot on the heels of the success of The Druidry Handbook and The Druid Magic Handbook, I tried to place Earth Divination, Earth Magic with Weiser. They weren't interested in a reprint but said they'd be happy with a new book on the same subject. So I wrote them a new book that covered exactly the same ground as Earth Divination, Earth Magic, and they snapped it up. Much later, Aeon Books picked up Earth Divination, Earth Magic and brought out a new edition. And that, my children, is why I have two books on geomancy from two different publishers covering exactly the same material, in head to head competition with each other. Most prolific authors end up with some such bizarrerie in their backlist sooner or later...
19	UFO Phenemenon		2009	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my nineteenth published book, The UFO Phenomenon (now available in an updated and expanded edition as The UFO Chronicles). Since I'd already written books about monsters and Atlantis, I figured that a book on UFOs was a logical next step, and it so happened that I was living in Ashland, Oregon just then, with access to an extremely good collection of UFO literature via the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library, a private library there. It was a fun book to write. Unlike my Atlantis book, which (as mentioned in an earlier Magic Monday) aged very poorly, this one has stood the test of time well; year after year, more evidence has surfaced to confirm the central thesis -- the massive role of US Air Force intelligence in manufacturing and promoting the UFO mythology. When I expanded and updated the book for Aeon Books a little while ago, I was able to put in many more data points supporting that argument.
20	Ecotechnic Future		2009	Peak Oil		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twentieth published book, The Ecotechnic Future. By this time my blog "The Archdruid Report" had been appearing weekly for a couple of years and was making an unexpected (to me) splash in the peak oil scene. Initial sales on my first peak oil book, The Long Descent, were good enough that the publisher was interested in a second volume, and of course I was perfectly willing to oblige. The Ecotechnic Future was my first attempt to put the decline and fall of industrial civilization into its broader context and talk about human history on the grand scale; to my mind, it stands up very well after all these years. This was also, however, the first book of mine I had to put up a sustained fight to get through the editing process intac. The editor wasn't satisfied with correcting my grammar and the like, which I'm fine with -- he tried to insist that I should rewrite the book to say what he thought it should say, not what I was trying to say. Maybe it was that I was contradicting the conventional wisdom too obviously, maybe it was something else, but for a decade or so from 2007 or so on, I had to deal with repeated attempts of this kind, and not just from one publisher, either. Fortunately I was able to push back hard, but it ended up causing me to change publishers more than once.
21	Picatrix		2010	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-first published book, my second published book-length translation, and my third co-written project. It's also one of my most famous projects. How to describe Picatrix? The easiest way to explain it is to say that it's a fabled book of forbidden magic written by a mad Arab sorcerer in the early Middle Ages, packed with strange incantations that can call down eldritch powers from the heavens when the stars are right. You know, the Necronomicon! The big difference is that Picatrix is quite real. It was a manual for professional wizards penned in Muslim Spain in the 11th century by an anonymous Arab author about whose sanity I don't propose to speculate, and it does in fact teach invocations for calling down stellar and planetary powers using astrological magic when the heavens are in an appropriate condition. In its Latin translation, prepared in the 13th century at the court of Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, it was immensely influential in occult circles all through Europe until the end of the Renaissance, but until Chris Warnock and I got to work on it, there had never been a usable English translation of the Latin text. Chris and I spent years slogging through the awkward half-Spanish medieval Latin of the text and turning it into readable English, but it finally saw print (via Chris's house press) in 2010. It's been enormously successful, both in terms of sales and as a pair of shock paddles applied to the once-prostrate form of classical astrological magic, which is now once again a widely practiced tradition; it's one I still practice from time to time, though it's not my usual approach to magic. It's only fair to say that this is emphatically not a book for beginners, and requires a good solid knowledge of medieval astrology, Platonic philosophy, and herbalism. If you're up for it, though, you can get a copy here.
22	Secrets of the Lost Symbol		2010	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was, technically speaking, my twenty-second published book, and I literally had nothing to do with it. What the people at Llewellyn Publications did in 2010, when they heard about the forthcoming Dan Brown novel, was pull every entry from my book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult that they thought might be relevant to the novel, put it into a small paperback, and get the presses running. I didn't even know they were doing it until the foreign rights sales started coming in. Lucrative? You bet, and I'll give Llewellyn this, my royalty checks benefited substantially from it. I don't recommend that anyone go get a copy, though. There's nothing in it that you won't find in the encyclopedia, and it's not especially good as a guide to the Dan Brown book, either. One of those things...
23	The Wealth of Nature		2011	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-third published book, and my third book inspired by (and partly assembled from) posts on my blog The Archdruid Report. By the itme I started working on it I'd dealt with the basic issues surrounding peak oil and the impending decline of industrial civilization, and set that latter process in the perspective of human history and evolution. My next concern was figuring out why the "science" of economics, which in theory ought to have figured such things out, in practice yields such consistently wrong answers when tasked with such questions. (As the joke goes, what do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Wrong.) This book, largely inspired by E.F. Schumacher's classic Small is Beautiful, was my first serious attempt to sort out the factors that cause conventional economics to come up with such consistently bad advice and wrong predictions. It's still a good solid introduction to the topic, and will be back in print early next year.
24	Apocalypse Not		2011	-		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-fourth published book, and in commercial terms it was a total flop. The 2012 hysteria was in full and florid bloom when I started it, and I figured that somebody needed to write a book pointing out, first, that the entire prediction was based on an absurd misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar as filtered through the hallucinogen-soaked brain of drug guru Terence McKenna, and second, that the pattern of belief I called "the apocalypse meme" was one of the most reliable ways to generate bad predictions ever invented in the lifetime of our species. I was foolish enough to think that somebody or other wanted to know this. No such luck; sales were feeble. Of course I was right -- the 2012 business turned out to be an even bigger flop than my book -- but nobody wanted to hear it. It's still a fun little book.
25	Druid Grove Handbook		2011	Druid		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-fifth published book. During my time as head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, it became clear that we needed a few books for members with rituals and the like. This was the first of them, a guide to the ritual work of a grove (that's what you call a group of Druids) in AODA. It was a pleasant, simple, straightforward job, and I didn't (and don't) make a cent from it -- all proceeds go to AODA. It seemed to me that this was appropriate for what was, after all, a labor of love.
26	Druid Revival Reader		2011	Druid		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-sixth published book. During my time as head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, it became clear that we needed a few books for members with rituals and the like. This was the second of them, a collection of documents from the 300-year history of the Druid Revival, that quirky and lively indigenous nature religion of modern Anglo-American culture in which I found my spiritual home. The collection is a mixed bag, like the movement it chronicles, but it remains in print and I think fifteen years of modest but steady sales shows that it's a useful contribution. Like my other books published under AODA auspices, btw, I get no royalties from this one; it was a labor of love and the income goes to the order.
27	Mystery Teachings of the Living Earth		2012	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-seventh published book. I imagine most people in the occult scene these days are familiar with The Kybalion, by "Three Initiates" (all of whom were named William Walker Atkinson); it's a useful book but some of its attitudes have landed people in a world of hurt when taken in a one-sided way, especially when stretched all out of shape in the service of greed. Mulling over that in the wake of the 2008-2009 real estate crash and general financial crisis, much of which was driven by the delusional notion that investments will increase forever in price if you just wish that hard enough. (Think of it as the Tinkerbell theory of economics.) This slender book was the result. It offers a set of seven basic principles that are applicable to ecology and occultism equally. I'm glad to say it remains a steady seller, though the latest economic fixations suggest that its effects are not as widespread as one might hope! You can get a copy here.
28	Blood of the Earth		2012	Peak Oil	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-eighth published book, and one of the oddest. On the blog I was doing then, The Archdruid Report, I ended up doing a whole series of posts on the relation between magic and peak oil. It became very popular among my readers, and so I decided to risk the experiment of assembling them into a book, adding such additional information and reflection as seemed appropriate, and offered it to one of the small presses that were pioneering the new business model of fine editions of occult books. Much to my surprise, Scarlet Imprint accepted it and brought it out in two editions, one good hardback edition and one over-the-top bound in black goatskin with gilt edges. Even more to my surprise, it sold out, and did so promptly enough that the publisher then issued a paperback edition, which is still in print. As with so much else that emerged during the heyday of the peak oil movement, it's unfashionable these days but no less valid than it was; you can get a copy from the publisher here.
29	Green Wizardry		2013	Peak Oil	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my twenty-ninth published book, and remains far and away the most successful of my books from the peak oil era. Its genesis, like most of my other peak oil books, began on the blog I ran in those days, The Archdruid Report, with a series of posts on the appropriate technology movement -- one of the most promising of the movements of the 1970s ecological scene, which attempted to craft advanced technologies that could work within the limits of sustainability. Though it was erased from collective memory by mass media and corporate interests, it produced quite a few useful technologies, and this book was my attempt to bring those back to the attention of those who might use them. Given the steady sales of this book, I still have hope. If you're interested, you can get a copy here.
30	Not The Future We Ordered		2013	Peak Oil		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my thirtieth published book and, in sales terms, one of my least successful works yet. I was invited by a small psychology press, Karnac Books, to write a book about the psychological implications of peak oil. It was an interesting project and one that I accepted with enthusiasm; it got a nice clean editing job and a good cover, and saw print. The result was one of my better books, a tolerably crisp analysis of the cascading mental health consequences of the mismatch between the modern mythology of progress and the reality of decline. Those few psychologists who noticed its existence at all, however, responded with horror or flat dismissal. Its sales have been so modest that, while it remains in print (with a firm that bought out most of Karnac's titles), the distributor that supplies stock to my Bookshop store doesn't carry it. You can get it from your favorite online bookstore.
31	Celtic Golden Dawn		2013	Celtic Golden Dawn	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my thirty-first published book; I've been covering some of my less successful titles of late, but this isn't one of those -- not by a long shot. Years before, I'd begun to stumble across scraps of information about groups in Britain between the wars that combined the symbolism and teachings of the Druid Revival with the magical techniques of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Those went out of fashion after the Second World War with the rise of Wicca, and very little apparently survived of their teachings and traditions. When it finally became clear to me that I wasn't going to be able to get any of the teachings of these groups, I set out to reverse engineer a comparable system, using my own background in Druidry and the Golden Dawn as a basis. This was the first of several books that resulted. It's a complete curriculum of ceremonial magic using Golden Dawn methods and Druid Revival symbolism, and it's attracted an active community of practitioners, which you can find (should you be interested) here. The book? It's still very much in print and readily available; you can get a copy here.
32	Gnostic Celtic Church		2013	Druid	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my thirty-second published book, another volume for the Ancient Order of Druids in America. At the time I wrote it, in 2012, the AODA was shaping up to be the only surviving branch of the various esoteric orders and traditions that John Gilbert had passed on to me and my late wife, and so the two of us (both then archdruids in AODA) and the rest of the Grand Grove talked about what else we might be able to recover. Reactivating a branch of the Universal Gnostic Church seemed like a good idea -- but we didn't want it to be yet another Pagan ordination mill churning out certificates for people who just wanted to perform marriages and claim unearned moral authority. Long conversations resulted in the idea of a monastic clergy, aloing the lines of the UGC's own monastic orders, with a distinctive liturgy and training program. This book was the result: a discussion of the Gnostic Celtic Church, its origins, and its training program, together with complete texts of its liturgies. Anyone can perform its communion ceremony, btw -- in this tradition becoming a priest doesn't confer any rights, it involves instead taking on responsibilities. The GCC is still a thriving concern in AODA, and details can be found here. If you're interested in the book, you can order a copy here.
33	Star's Reach		2014	Novel 2	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left was my thirty-third published book and my second published novel. It had a long genesis: I wrote it as a series of one-a-month blog posts over a four year period, from late 2004 to early 2009. I'd previously done several brief fictional pieces on The Archdruid Report, the blog I had in those days, using the tools of fiction to talk about the future we were heading for; I decided to see if I could do something a little longer and more ambitious -- and Star's Reach was the result. It's set in the 2470s in Meriga, which is what they call "America" by then; two civil wars and a long process of technological decline have landed most Merigans in something not that different from a medieval society, though it's by no means identical to medieval Europe. In that future, a very large share of raw materials come from urban ruins, extracted by members of the guild of ruinmen...and it's while nearly getting killed dismantling a ruin that one young ruinman, Trey sunna Gwen, finds a clue to a legendary place where humanity might once have talked with intelligent beings from another world -- a place called Star's Reach. It's an early novel of mine and there are aspects of it that seem clumsy to me now, but on the whole it still works very well. It's held together largely by Trey's distinctive first-person voice as he narrates his journey and his reflections, by turns clueless and shrewd, on the world of his time and the old world it replaced. Just at the moment it's temporarily out of print, but will be back on the shelves in November of this year; you can preorder a copy here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
34	Decline and Fall		2014	Peak Oil	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-fourth published book and the fifth of my peak oil books for New Society Publishers. It first saw print ten years ago, and it's turned out to be one of the most durable of those works, despite being heavy on predictions, some of which doubtless seemed far-fetched at the time. The revolution in military affairs I predicted, for example, is playing out very nearly to spec on the plains of eastern Ukraine while I write this, and even the corporate media (who are generally the last to notice, or at least talk about, the changes that matter) are beginning to talk about the twilight of America's global hegemony -- the central theme of this book and the central political fact of our time. If you want to see how well my predictions have done so far, and where we're headed next, you can order a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
35	Twilight's Last Gleaming		2014	Novel 3	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-fifth published book and my third published novel. It had an even odder beginning than most. I'd just wrapped up a series of posts on my blog about how the United States was heading for disaster, and some of my readers were still giving me blank looks. I decided that a fictional narrative based on historical equivalents might help make the point. Five posts later, I'd sketched out a narrative. It was simple enough. In the story, a corrupt and incompetent president gets the US into a proxy war with one of its main geopolitical rivals in the hope of seizing an important source of natural resources. Unfortunately the rival power pushes back hard, and US military technology turns out to be hopelessly inadequate in the face of a determined enemy with modern weapons. The resulting crisis sends internal conflicts in the US spinning out of control, as a failed administration desperately tries to keep its grip on power by any means, however illegal, and -- well, I'll leave out the final spoilers, but there's a political assassination in there, among many other things. Keep in mind this was written ten years ago, and I really did intend it to be fiction. I got an offer from a publisher to turn the original five-part series into a novel. Sales have been modest but steady, and it's still very much in print; you can get a copy here in the US and here elsewhere.
36	After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age		2015	Peak Oil	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-sixth published book, and to my mind it's the best of the books that came out of my decade of blogging on peak oil. I decided in 2013 that it was time to tackle belief in progress, the secular religion that dominates the modern Western world, and talk about where that ersatz faith came from, what role it plays in our problems, and why it's collapsing around us. That's what After Progress accomplished, and I think it did so very well, covering ground that extended from ancient mythology to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Inevitably--the books of mine that I consider my best work always sell very poorly--it was the least popular of my peak oil books, and went out of print sooner than any of the others. It's currently available only used or in ebook form, though that should change next year.
37	Dark Age America		2016	Peak Oil	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-seventh published book. Dark Age America was published in 2016, as the United States was winding up its long afternoon of business as usual and plunging into an era of crisis that hasn't ended yet. I'd sketched out the process by which the US empire was ending in my earlier book Decline and Fall, and decided to try something on a larger scale: basically, an attempt to sketch out the history of North America in advance for the next 500 years. I think it worked pretty well; after nearly a decade, I haven't yet seen any reason to change the portrait sketched out in its pages. Unlike most of my New Society books, it's still in print; you can get a copy here in the US and here elsewhere.
38	The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth		2016	Novel 4	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-eighth published book and my fourth published novel; it's also a book I had no intention of writing, and it's one of my personal favorites of my novels. Beginning around the time that I finished the first draft of A World Full of Gods, my exploration of polytheism, I started mulling over the prospect of saying the same things in fiction using the Great Old Ones, H.P. Lovecraft's tentacled monster-gods, as a way to talk about our culture's fear and hatred of anything superhuman and transcendent. I sketched out a few bits of rough draft here and there, but never did much with it. Then over the course of a few days in the fall of 2015 an entire novel downloaded itself into my brain and would not leave me any peace until I wrote it. I hammered out the 70,000-word first draft in eight weeks -- the fastest I've ever written anything on that scale. The result was a lively tentacular romp in which Owen Merrill, a grad student at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, finds out that H.P. Lovecraft's "fictional" creations are anything but imaginary, that everything he knows about history is wrong, and that those writhing tentacles may hold the last hope for the survival of the earth. There are sequels, but it stands alone tolerably well as a novel. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the United States and here if you live elsewhere.
39	Retrotopia		2016	Novel 5	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my thirty-ninth published book and my fifth published novel, and this one -- unlike the one we discussed last week -- I intended to write. Retrotopia began life as a series of posts on the blog I ran then, The Archdruid Report. I wanted to take the themes I was developing for two nonfiction books, After Progress and The Retro Future, and use fiction as a way of making them vivid and understandable. So I sent Peter Carr, a high-ranking political adviser to the newly elected president of one of several post-US republics, across the border into a neighboring republic and a confrontation with a nation that had leapt ahead of everyone else by going back to the past. Writing it was an interesting experience; as with my earlier venture along the same lines, Star's Reach, some of my readers literally couldn't think the thoughts the story was trying to get them to think, and kept defaulting to the approved notions of the modern cult of progress. Nonetheless the book, once published, turned out to be my most popular work of fiction. It's currently out of print but will be back in print this coming November; you can preorder a copy here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
40	The Secret of the Temple		2016	Temple	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my fortieth published book, and the product of an investigation that's still ongoing. I happened to notice back in the early 1990s, as a result of voracious reading in odd books, that a surprising number of temple traditions around the world are connected to legends about increased agricultural fertility. I know, that's supposed to be mere superstition -- but it's funny how often "mere superstition" turns into evidence that the ancients knew more than it's fashionable for modern intellectuals to admit. That launched a quest that resulted in this book. I've come to theorize that woven into the design and use of certain specific kinds of temples is a lost folk technology that boosts agricultural productivity. I've collected physical evidence (including controlled double-blind studies) that there are energies known to science that could have been concentrated and put to use with resonating chambers of stone, designed according to specific geometries, filled with volatile organic compounds, and activated with sound waves. What's more, it's a technology that could be rediscovered and put to work to help plants thrive now. This book was my first progress report on that investigation. It's about to go out of print -- Llewellyn, the original publisher, still has a few copies left on sale, which you can get here -- but there'll be another edition in due time, and probably a further book not too long after that, as I'm continuing to find relevant data. Yes, there are also other people busy with this; the prospect of a working model, so that the details of the technology can be tested in real world conditions, may not be far off.
41	On the Shadows of the Ideas		2017	Translation	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-first published book and my second solo translation. The Art of Memory, an ancient system of mnemonic practice popular among Renaissance occultists, has been an interest of mine since I first learned about it in my late twenties; Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake as an unrepentant heretic in 1600, was one of the great masters of the art of memory; and I like to translate things out of Latin in much the same spirit that other people do crossword puzzles, so a translation of Bruno's On the Shadows of the Ideas was a natural for me. Azoth Press, the publisher, brought out a fine edition bound in black Nigerian goatskin -- no, I am not making this up -- along with an ordinary hardback edition, and when those sold out, promptly issued a trade paper edition which is still very much in print. Bruno's work is the high water mark of the Art of Memory and this book shows it. It's an intricate, demanding text that assumes the reader already knows the standard art of memory. Still, if you've read Frances Yates's The Art of Memory -- still the best introduction to the subject -- and put some time into practicing the version of the art she describes in detail, you can tackle Bruno's methods with good results. You can order a copy here in the United States or at your favorite online or full service bookstore elsewhere.
42	Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic		2017	Translation	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-second published book and my second co-translation. I'd been grumbling for years about the dismal quality of A.E. Waite's translation of Lévi's masterpiece, that led to a freewheeling discussion on my blog, and Mark Mikituk, who at that time made his living translating French into English, contacted me and suggested a joint translation. I took him up on it. At that time I happened to have a personal connection with the editor of TarcherPenguin's occult line, and decided to see if I could evade the usual corporate-publisher barriers and approach him directly, instead of having to go through an agent, etc.; this once, it worked, and once Mark and I had finished our translation it was picked up by TarcherPenguin for a nice advance. The book itself -- well, what can I say? It's the theme of my current monthly book club posts over on the blog; it's the most important and influential work on magic to appear in the 19th century, and it defines much of the occult revival since its publication (no surprises there, since it basically launched that revival). I don't think it's possible to understand modern occultism without having at least some acquaintance with this book. If you're interested, you can order a copy here in the United States and from your favorite online retailer or full service bookstore elsewhere.
43	The Weird of Hali: Kingsport		2018	Novel 6	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-third published book and my sixth published novel. When I finished the first of my tentacle novels, The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, I had no idea what I was going to do with the really rather odd para-Lovecraftian fictional cosmos that downloaded itself into my head in the process of writing that first novel. I wasn't even sure at first there would be a sequel, but I enjoyed that world too much to set it aside after just one book. That's when quiet, mousy little Jenny Parrish, a minor character from the first novel, started the process that turned her into one of the two main characters of the series. I don't invent my characters. I meet them in the recesses of my imagination, and they constantly do things that surprise me. (I suspect this will sound like florid psychosis to anyone who isn't a writer of fiction, but it's the way many of us do things.) Jenny's the all time champion at surprising me in a story. She very quietly let me know that she should be the main character of the second book. When I began writing, I had no idea what her backstory was, I didn't know that she was asexual, I had no idea what her connection to the Lovecraftian cosmos was, and I certainly had no idea that she was only half human and would become the greatest sorceress of this age of the world; she took the lead, in much the same way that Trey sunna Gwen did in the writing of Star's Reach, except Trey was about as subtle as a ruinman's iron pry bar and liked to tip back a few beers and talk, while Jenny simply showed me which way to go and let me figure out the rest for myself. The book duly got finished and saw print. I kept writing, though various confusions got in the way of publishing the others for a while; when they finally got into print, it was all in a lump. If you're interested in this volume of the series, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
44	The Coelbren Alphabet: The Forgotten Oracle of the Welsh Bards		2017	Druid	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-fourth published book and the result of one of my more improbable discoveries. The Coelbren, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is a vaguely runic alphabet invented (probably) by Iolo Morganwg aka Edward Williams, a brilliant, batty Welsh poet who contributed a vast amount to the Druid Revival. People had been trying for years to figure out how to use it for divination but nobody could figure out what the individual letters meant. (I've included an example below on theright to show you what it looks like; that's the name of the Welsh province of Ceredigion.) coelbren in useOne afternoon I was in a used book store in central Maryland, right up against the Appalachians, and noticed an odd old book in what was literally the darkest, most obscure corner of the store. I pulled it out and discovered that it was a book on the history of Welsh grammar. Flipping through it, I spotted a reference to a book I'd never heard of by an author I knew well, J. Williams ab Ithel, one of Iolo Morganwg's disciples. I bought the grammar book, went searching for the book by Williams ab Ithel online, found it, downloaded it, and discovered that it contained a nearly complete key to the meanings of the Coelbren letters. The first version of my book on Coelbren followed promptly, setting out a fairly complete system of divination; a second version, greatly expanded and improved with much more material on Coelbren magic and occultism, came out thereafter. If you're interested -- and if you're into Druidry, you should be -- you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
45	The Retro Future		2017	Peak Oil	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-fifth published book and the last of my books to come out of my former blog, The Archdruid Report. The last theme I developed in any detail there was the recognition that blind faith in progress had cut most people off from the single most useful source of working options available to us -- that is, the past. My novel Retrotopia had sketched out that theme in fictional form, my nonfiction work After Progress had delved into the bogus religion that had arisen around the myth of progress, but I wanted to say a few things about the practical side of using the past as a resource for the future. A flurry of posts, and then this book, were the results. It sold very poorly, and there were reasons for that. The peak oil movement had collapsed completely by the time it saw print in 2017, and all the publicity and money had long since been redirected into a moronically oversimplified narrative about climate change that insisted that we were all going to fry like pork chops on a grill sometime very soon unless billions of dollars were flushed down the ratholes of photovoltaic solar energy and giant wind turbines, both of which had already been tested and found inadequate. All the other issues surrounding pollution and resource depletion, and every other aspect of the predicament of industrial society, got stuffed down the memory hole in a hurry in those years. The project of reviving older, less extravagant, and more resilient technologies from the past? Nobody was interested. A new edition will be out this October, and you can order a copy here; we'll see if the unraveling of the status quo under way right now gives it a chance to be heard.
46	The Occult Book		2017	Coffee Table	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-sixth published book and my first for Barnes & Noble's house publisher -- Sterling Press, as it was then called. (It's Union Square these days.) The project wasn't my idea, either -- one of their editors contacted me out of the blue to ask if I was interested in doing a book in their series of glossy coffee-table books givi9ng 100 chronologically arranged vignettes on some subject or other. The advance they offered was substantial, the work required on my end fairly easy, so I said yes. It turned out to be a fun project and the book that resulted -- a lively and gorgeously illustrated beginner's history of occultism -- sold very well. It's still in print and still selling well; you can get a copy here if you live in the US and at your favorite online or local bookstore if you're elsewhere.
47	The Conspiracy Book		2018	Coffee Table	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-seventh published book and my second for Barnes & Noble's house publisher -- Sterling Press, as it was then called. (It's Union Square these days.) The Occult Book was still in process when the editors decided they wanted something similar about conspiracies. Since 2017 was a challenging year for me, with a difficult relocation and a range of other challenges to cope with, this was the only book I published in 2018, but it made up for that by selling like hotcakes. Like The Occult Book, it's a coffee table book of 100 historical vignettes from the history of secret societies and conspiracies, lavishly illustrated and with an ample bibliography. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US and from your favorite local or online bookseller otherwise.
48	A Magical Education		2019	Talks	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-eighth published book and the first volume of short pieces I published. By 2017, when I assembled it, I was no longer doing the Neopagan conference circuit, partly because I'd stepped down as head of AODA and partly because my late wife's health was failing and having me on the road was increasingly hard on her. So I took the most popular talks I'd been giving, turned them into a book, and after a little searching found a home for it with Aeon Press; that turned into the beginning of a successful working relationship that continues to this day. The book is a good general introduction to my ideas; you can get a copy of it here in the United States and here elsewhere.
49	The Weird of Hali: Chorazin		2019	Novel 7	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my forty-ninth published book, my seventh published novel, and the book in which The Weird of Hali really found its rhythm. It was harder to write than the two earlier volumes in my para-Lovecraftian series; Innsmouth practically wrote itself, and Kingsport took a little more work but I never had to struggle to see where it was going. Chorazin began smoothly, but once the action reached the little town of Chorazin in the shadow of Elk Hill, it took me repeated drafts to get things to come out right. Still, I think the result was as good as anything in the series, and it brought in themes and characters who turned out to be central to later books. You can order a copy here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
50	The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands		2019	Novel 8	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above was my fiftieth published book and my eighth published novel. (Once I found a publisher that was willing to take a chance on my fiction, it came out in a rush, so we're going to be in tentacle land for a little while!) Miriam Akeley, a sixty-something college professor, was an important subsidiary character in the first two Haliverse novels, and took center stage in this one. As usual with these novels, I had no idea where it was going to end up and was astonished by some of the twists and turns. One of the reviews this novel got finally succeeded in cluing me in about why my fiction leaves so many people baffled. The reviewer thought it was a good story, but was completely floored by the fact that Miriam was, you know, an ordinary person, without superpowers or anything else that made her unlike the rest of our species. That's when I realized that the reason so much of today's fiction sucks is that it's obsessed with the dreary fantasy of being the One Special Person around whom the whole world revolves. Me, I prefer stories about the rest of us. If you have similar tastes, you can order a copy here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
51	The Weird of Hali: Providence		2019	Novel 9	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now. This was my fifty-first published book, the fifth volume in The Weird of Hali and the only book in that series that takes place in a town that actually exists. Yes, that would be Providence, Rhode Island, across the Seekonk River from where I live now. I had the chance to visit partway through the process of writing the story, which was helpful, and also has a lot to do with why I live in Rhode Island these days. I used a mashup of H.P. Lovecraft's Providence stories as the raw material, so we get to find out what Charles Dexter Ward was really up to. One of the entertaining features of these novels is that I kept on having to come up with new, colorful ways to do in the villains. It's Lovecraftian fiction, right? They can't just die in some bland ordinary way, like being shot. This one borrowed one cause of death from Lovecraft himself and another from Arthur Machen, one of the writers Lovecraft admired most, whose writing I appreciate and whose thinking annoys the bejesus out of me. I thought they both worked tolerably well. If that sounds entertaining, why, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here if you're elsewhere.
52	Haliverse: The Shoggoth Converto		2019	Novel 10	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now. This was my fifty-second published book, and it's another tentacle novel, but it's not a part of the core Weird of Hali sequence. The Shoggoth Concerto came slithering up out of my subconscious while I was hoping to get the rest of the Weird published but things weren't looking especially promising; I thought that an independent novel set in the same fictional cosmos might be able to get a hearing at one of the big publishers...and then I started writing, and it turned into the oddest of my many odd books. You know all those stories about someone who has brash new innovative ideas and gets bullied by the defenders of tradition? This is a story about someone who wants to do something traditional and gets bullied by the avant-garde, which is of course much more common these days. It's also about love, memory, magic, and shoggoths, and to my taste, it's still the best of my novels. I did submit it to a big publisher; I actually got a personal response, which is rare, saying that it was too quiet and too weird -- those were the editor's exact words -- but that if I wanted to write something more publishable I could send it directly to her. I rolled my eyes and found someplace else to publish, as bending the knee to the shallow fashionable clichés of big-brand fantasy and SF is the last thing I wanted (or want) to do. If shoggoths or classical music appeal to you, you can buy a copy of The Shoggoth Concerto here if you're in the US and here if you're elsewhere.
53	The Weird of Hali: Red Hook		2019	Novel 11	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now. This was my fifty-third published book, and we're back in The Weird of Hali. This book had the longest and most roundabout genesis of all my tentacle novels. I'd originally planned for the sixth book in the sequence to be set in Greenland, and I wrote six drafts of that novel before realizing that there was too much story to fit into the limits I'd defined for the Weird. So I set the Greenland story aside -- it appeared later, much amended and with different characters, as A Voyage to Hyperborea -- and wrote this one, drawing heavily on the handful of stories Lovecraft set in New York City. Justin Martense, the central figure in The Weird of Hali: Chorazin, became the viewpoint character in this story, and gave me the chance to explore a heroic fantasy with a very unheroic main character; I later did the same thing to an even greater extent with Toby Gilman, the main character of A Voyage to Hyperborea, who's even more of a dweeb than Justin but rises to the challenges before him in his inimitably awkward way. If you're wondering why I put dorky characters into these two books, why, it's the same reason I made an utterly unheroic sixty-year-old college professor coping with terminal cancer the main character of The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands; I'm bored to tears by the specially special protagonists -- and did I mention that they're special? -- who infest so much fiction these days, and wanted to explore the much more interesting (to me) situation of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. If that turns your crank, why, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
54	The Weird of Hali: Arkham		2019	Novel 12	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-fourth published book, the conclusion of The Weird of Hali. It had its genesis, in a certain sense, decades earlier, when I read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series of fantasies for older children. The first four books in the sequence -- The Dark is Rising; Over Sea, Under Stone; Greenwitch; and The Grey King -- were first-rate, vivid fantasies that drew on British folklore and legend to chronicle a tale of warring magical forces in modern Britain. I adored them and read them over and over again. Then came the final book in the sequence, Silver On The Tree, which I read once to my bitter disappointment and never touched again. The grand final struggle between the Light and the Dark reached its grand anticlimax in a scene just a few pages long, and then all the wizards and magical beings packed their bags and went away forever, leaving the other characters sitting in the prosaic modern world. Cooper might as well have said in so many words, "All right, children, playtime is over, now forget all about magic and wonder and go back to your boring lives." I never forgave her for that, and many years passed before I read any of her books again. So when I found myself writing a story that in some ways approximated The Dark is Rising series -- well, as seen through a tentacular funhouse mirror -- I promised myself from the beginning that I wouldn't do the same thing to my readers. You'll notice on the cover the image of Great Cthulhi rising from the sea. In Arkham, the stars are right at last, and nothing will ever be the same again. Interested? You can get a copy here if you live in the US and here elsewhere.
55	The City of Hermes		2019	Essays	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-fifth published book, one of 2019's few breaks from the relentless pace of my tentacle fiction publications, and a very bittersweet experience for me. A long time ago, back in the 1980s and 1990s, I had a dream that failed. I dreamed of building a bridge between the modern Hermeticism of the Golden Dawn tradition and the older and richer tradition of Renaissance Hermeticism; I hoped to attract the interest of Golden Dawn students to such things as sacred geometry, elemental medicine, the Art of Memory, and the Hermetically inspired swordsmanship of Gerard Thibault, all of which were standard among Renaissance Hermeticists and could become part of a renewed Hermetic spirituality. I tried my best to achieve that, using the limited means and skills I had at the time, and got zero response. Later in the 1990s, recognizing the failure of the dream, I put more of my efforts into Druidry, and that ended up succeeding beyond my expectations -- so I shelved the older project. This volume contains the essays and articles I wrote to try to build the bridge I'd imagined. Predictably, despite the efforts of the publisher, the republication got no more attention in the Hermetic scene than my original efforts had. I still hope that someday somebody will build that bridge and enrich modern Hermeticism with the extraordinary wealth of the older tradition, but it's pretty clear at this stage that the person in question won't be me. If the book interests you, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
56	Haliverse: Nyogotha Variations		2020	Novel 13	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-sixth published book, and we're back in tentacle territory -- the second half of the story of Brecken Kendall, modern Baroque composer and friend of shoggoths. To the best of my knowledge, it's also the only work of eldritch fantasy in English that also includes serious opera criticism. (I didn't plan on that, but once Brecken started writing an opera using that infamous play The King in Yellow for a libretto, it was hard to avoid...) At any rate, it's another romp through a Lovecraftian world turned topsy-turvy, in which love, death, classical music, and tentacled horrors from before the dawn of time play a giddy counterpoint to The Weird of Hali. If you're interested, Sphinx Books has a nice new edition out, which you can get here in the United States or here if you live somewhere else in the world. (This world, at least. If you dwell in lost Carcosa, you'll have to talk to the eldritch horrors there and find out where they buy books.)
57	Voyage to Hyperborea		2020	Novel 14	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-seventh published book, and we're still in tentacle territory. A Voyage to Hyperborea started out as the sixth volume of The Weird of Hali -- that was originally going to be The Weird of Hali: Hyperborea -- but after two complete drafts and four more partial attempts it became clear to me that there was too much story to fit within the series, so I sent Justin Martense and Belinda Marsh to the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn instead, and found a new set of characters to journey to Greenland and plunge into a tale of love, adventure, and loss among the ruins of preglacial Hyperborea. It's the longest of my tentacle novels -- with the exception of Star's Reach, the longest of all my novels so far -- and a good lively romp; it also has the most relentlessly ordinary of my protagonists; despite his Deep One ancestry and his more or less successful struggle to rise to the challenge of the adventure into which he's caught up, Toby Gilman is basically a dweeb. Putting ordinary characters in extraordinary situations is what I do. If you're interested, a copy of the new Sphinx Books edition can be had here if you're in the US and here elsewhere. (Of all my books, this one -- not, surprisingly, the two shoggoth novels with their composer heroine -- is the one most influenced by a specific piece of music. Listen sometime to the Prelude to Richard Wagner's opera Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) -- it's the sound track to this novel.)
58	The Seal of Yueh Lao		2020	Novel 15	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-righth published book, and the last contribution (so far) to the Cthulhu mythos to come from my keyboard. I hadn't planned on writing The Seal of Yueh Lao at all, but there were too many loose ends left hanging when I'd wrapped up The Weird of Hali, and this story took shape as I considered them. It's the shortest of my tentacle novels, a quiet little coming-of-age story with Asenath Merrill, the oldest daughter of the central character of The Weird of Hali, as its protagonist, and a tangled web of events borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers for its mainspring. All in all, it worked surprisingly well. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.
59	Dolmen Arch Volume 1: The Lesser Mysteries		2020	Druid	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my fifty-ninth published book, and those of you who aren't Lovecraft fans can breathe a sigh of relief now, as we're out of tentacle territory at long last. The Dolmen Arch is a study course in Druidical occultism, and it came about in a very odd way. The Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), the order I more or less rescued from the dumpster in 2003, had been through political struggles a decade further back and a lot of people had bailed out. After I became Grand Archdruid, since I hadn't been involved in any of the fussing, some of these people contacted me or simply mailed me packages with notes amounting to, "Now that you're Grand Archdruid you ought to have this." What "this" amounted to was a very mixed bag, but in one package, tucked into a bunch of unrelated papers on French occult orders, were parts of a couple of lessons of an old American Druid correspondence course from between the two world wars. I spent a while being annoyed that the rest of the course was nowhere to be found. Then it occurred to me that I could reverse engineer it without too much difficulty, since I'd been able to figure out some of the important influences on the course and I also had a wealth of other twentieth century Druid material. The result was a hefty seven-unit correspondence course. I taught it privately to students for a while, then arranged to publish it with Azoth Press in a very nice fine edition. When that sold out, Azoth decided to bring out a trade paper edition, which is still available and selling steadily. Apparently there's a demand for fussy, richly philosophical, old-fashioned Druid training. This is the first volume of two. If you're in the market for that, you can get copies here in the US and from your favorite online retailer elsewhere.
60	Dolmen Arch Volume 2: The Greater Mysteries		2020	Druid	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my sixtieth published book, the second volume of the sprawling study course in Druidical occultism I assembled from fragments, scraps, and a lot of William Walker Atkinson's more obscure writings, as chronicled in the intro to last week's Magic Monday. The Lesser Mysteries comprise four grades, the Greater Mysteries three more, finishing up with the grade of Gwyddon Rhydd or Free Loremaster, which brings with it the right to teach the system. There's a modest but significant number of Free Loremasters running around these days, and some of them do in fact teach; most students of the Dolmen Arch, however, simply learn it from the two books. One way or another, if you're interested, you can find copies for sale here in the US and at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookseller elsewhere.
61	Beyond the Narratives: Essays on Occultism and the Future		2020	Essays	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This was my sixty-first published book and my third anthology of short pieces, including all my best essays from my post-Hermetic period (the Hermetic essays were released earlier in my 2019 book The City of Hermes). It's probably the best one-volume introduction to the whole range of my ideas and interests, for anyone who wants to risk plunging down that N-dimensional rabbit hole. It also includes my most widely cited essay, "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." On the off chance you're interested, copies can be purchased here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.
62	The Sacred Geometry Oracle (Book & Card Deck)		2020	Golden Section	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-second published book and my first published oracle deck. It actually appeared in a different form, from a different publisher, more than two decades ago, but that was a disaster of such scale that I don't include it in my list of publications. (Somebody from the publisher went to see The Matrix the night before the planning committee met and insisted that the cards for this project, which I'd aimed at the Druid and earth-mysteries crowd, ought to be done in a futuristic rusted-metal, cracked-concrete, and vaguely radioactive style; when I explained the problem, I got a very snotty "shut up, we know what we're doing" in response. Of course it bombed. One of those things...) This version of the cards, by contrast, is plain black on white and very workable; someday I'd like to find an artist who can do the thing in the style I had in mind, with the diagrams traced in the earth, carved onto standing stones, and the like, but I'm in no hurry. For now, this is a fine version, and there's also another version in print, in red and black, with my enthusiastic encouragement. The Sacred Geometry Oracle is a set of 33 divination cards, each showing a simple geometrical construction. It's central to my Golden Section sequence of books, and it's also a fun and effective divinatory oracle in its own right. If you're interested, you can get a copy here in the US and here elsewhere.
63	The Mysteries of Merlin: Ceremonial Magic for the Druid Path		2020	Celtic Golden Dawn		The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-third published book, and you'll have a little trouble finding it right now, because its former publisher let it go out of print last year. The upsides are, first, that this gave me the chance to revise, expand, and improve it considerably; second, that I was able to give it the title I originally assigned it, Merlin's Wheel -- did you know that authors have no control over the titles and cover art of their books? -- and third, that I had it placed with a second publisher less than 24 hours after the old one let go of it. The book -- well, it's a sequel of sorts to my earlier book The Celtic Golden Dawn, providing a set of eight seasonal ceremonies inspired by ancient mystery rites, celebrating the legendary life of Merlin around the cycle of the year as a system of spiritual self-initiation. The new version has been expanded so that it can also be practiced within the ritual system of the Golden Section Fellowship and its related traditions, including the Dolmen Arch system and the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose. It'll be out later this year, and I'll make an announcement here and on my blog once it's available for preorder.
64	Journey Star		2021	Novel 16	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-fourth published book and sixteenth novel, and it's a sequel to my first novel, The Fires of Shalsha. Like that earlier novel, Journey Star is set on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani, which in the story was colonized two centuries back by a generation ship from Earth; like the earlier novel, it starts with a standard sort of conflict between seeming good and evil, but doesn't stay there. Having villains who are bad just because the heroes need someone to scorn and annihilate makes for dreary fiction; maybe, just maybe, even the most monstrous actions can be justified or even necessary in the eyes of those who do them... And that's all I'm going to say about this strangest (so far) of my novels. All things considered, I think it worked fairly well. If you're interested, you can get copies here if you're in the United States and here if you're elsewhere.
65	The King in Orange: the Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power		2021	-	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. Given the events scheduled tomorrow, I've pulled this one forward out of order; it's my 65th published book, the one that got me banned from science fiction conventions (despite 18 SF and fantasy novels currently in print) and dropped like a hot rock by most of the Neopagans I know. No, it's not a work of science fiction, nor does it have much to say about Neopaganism. It's a discussion of why the policies embraced by a bipartisan consensus of the elite classes in the US made the rise of Donald Trump or somebody like him inevitable. Yes, it also talks about magic -- the magical manipulations that were used for fifty years to silence any attempt to talk publicly about what the policies just mentioned did to the working classes in the United States, the magic wielded by a motley band of (mostly) young men living in their mothers' basements who marched off to the Meme Wars beneath the banner of a cartoon frog, and the magic attempted by the so-called Magic Resistance, whose attempts to cast death curses and other equally pleasant spells at the people they hate did a lot to bring about the events of last November and the days immediately before us. That is to say, it's just a little controversial. ;-) On the off chance you're interested anyway, you can order a copy here if you live in the US and at your favorite online shop or full service bookstore if you live elsewhere.
66	The Way of the Golden Section: A Manual of Occult Training		2021	Golden Section	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-sixth published book -- I've passed over The King in Orange, which was pulled out of order by the eldritch attraction of Inauguration Day and appeared in January -- and the beginning of my most ambitious publishing project to date: a complete system of occult training, original although based on the material I studied with John Gilbert, which fills roughly the same role as the correspondence courses offered by old-fashioned occult schools but is published for everyone to read. I stress the word "occult" here. Occultism and magic are not the same thing, though they're related to each other and can be compatible. Magic uses ritual as its primary tool, and has power as its theme and goal; occultism uses meditation as its primary tool, and has wisdom as its theme and goal. (Both contrast with mysticism, which -- in its western forms, at least -- uses prayer as its primary tool, and has love as its theme and goal.) The Way of the Golden Section and its sequels teach very little in the way of ritual and even less in the way of magic. They focus on meditation, divination, sacred geometry, and certain other standard occult practices, and their goal is to achieve wisdom, revelation, and enlightenment. This book -- which requires The Sacred Geometry Oracle for some of its work -- is the first step on that path. Interested? You can get copies here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere. (I recommend the hardback edition, btw: it's sturdy, and will stand up to the hard use you'll give it.)
67	The Druid Path: A Modern Tradition of Nature Spirituality		2022	Druid	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-seventh published book, and like everything else I've done for this particular publisher -- Union Square, formerly Sterling -- it wasn't my idea. They contacted me and asked for an introductory book on Druid nature spirituality. I can write one of those more or less in my sleep, so of course I agreed, not least because they're large enough to offer robust advances. It's not part of any series of books, nor does it teach the curriculum of any Druid order; it's a user-friendly, lavishly illustrated little hardback that teaches the complete beginner how to take up the practice of Druidry. Sales have been quite respectable, too. If you're interested, it can be purchased here in the US and at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookstore elsewhere.
68	The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences		2022	Astrology	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixth-eighty published book, and -- like some of the other things I've written -- it landed me in a certain amount of hot water. I noticed, not long after I started doing the kind of intermediate astrology that involves tracking transits of planets across natal chart positions, that most of the resulting predictions worked very well, but that those involving Pluto didn't. I then noticed that political and economic predictions involving Pluto -- not mine, in this case -- also flopped spectacularly. That launched me into a research project that convinced me that Pluto is in fact not a planet, but that it functioned like one in birth charts and mundane charts during the short period while astronomers mistook it for one. That led me to write The Twilight of Pluto, which talks about the complex way that planetary discoveries and downgradings relate to astrological prediction. The reason this got me into hot water is that Pluto has a huge astrological fan club. It's weird; no other planet has that kind of frankly addictive emotional hold on people. No other planet sees people make one false prediction after based on its movements, and just keep on doing it, without ever noticing that they're making fools of themselves. I didn't get into that in this book, but Pluto fans took offense anyway because I dissed their favorite planet. The book's sales have been slow, though a remarkable number of people seem to know about it. I still think it makes a valid case, I don't use Pluto in my political astrology...and, ahem, my predictions are more accurate than those who do. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and at your favorite book outlet elsewhere.
69	The Ceremony of the Grail: Ancient Mysteries, Gnostic Heresies, and the Lost Rituals of Freemasonry		2022			The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my sixty-ninth published book, and I'm annoyed to say it's currently out of print, even though it's been in print for only a little over two years; the original publisher, Llewellyn, dumped it a short time ago without warning or explanation even though there were still hundreds of copies in the warehouse, and the new publisher, Aeon, is waiting on my revisions and edits before bringing out a new edition. There are still copies of the original version in the sales pipeline for the moment, but if you want a copy you'll either need to move fast or wait a year and a half or so. This started out as a sequel, more or less, to my earlier volume The Secret of the Temple. As so often happens, though, it spun away into unfamiliar territory, touching on the Gnostic origins of the Grail legend and the survival of the ritual at the center of that legend into relatively recent times. In the process I worked out the Greek gematria of the Grail stories, explored the fascinating history of a region on the border between England and Scotland that may have been the last surviving Pagan sanctuary in western Europe, and was able to draft a reconstruction of the original Grail ritual itself. It was a wild ride. My Bookshop store is out of copies and so are some other venues; if you want a copy, you'll have to see what you can find online or off.
70	The Occult Philosophy Workbook: A One Year Course in the Secret Wisdom		2022	Golden Section	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventieth published book, the culmination of a project many years in the works. Regular readers of this Magic Monday column will recall my comments about The Sacred Geometry Oracle, which appeared many years ago in a butt-ugly edition due to the bad taste of its first publisher, and has since been restored to decent appearance by Aeon Books. That was originally meant to be the anchor of an entire series of books, including three manuals of practice and three workbooks of practical information. That vision of mine is finally on its way to fulfillment; The Way of the Golden Section was the first of the manuals and this is the first of the workbooks, forming the curriculum of the Golden Section Fellowship, a tradition (not an organization) with no dues, no membership cards, and no requirements for joining other than doing the work. This volume is a year-long course in traditional occult philosophy. It covers all the basics, from the planes of being and the structure of the human soul to the process of reincarnation and the cycles of time, and much more. It also provides an additional commentary on the seven principles discussed in my book Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth. All in all, it comprises a study course in traditional occult ideas as good as anything you could have gotten from occult schools a century ago. If you're interested, it can be bought here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere. (I recommend the hardback; if you treat it as intended, you're going to put some serious work into this book.)
71	A Commentary on The Cosmic Doctrine: Understanding Dion Fortune's Masterpiece of Spiritual Creation and Evolution		2022	Book Commentary	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-first published book and my first venture into what used to be a very common genre, the commentary on a spiritual classic. Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine is to my mind the most important volume of occult philosophy from the 20th century; it's as important as it is difficult to read, and I decided to put up monthly commentaries on each chapter on my blog. That turned into a very solid book, which many readers have already told me makes a good introduction to Fortune's work. A Commentary on the Cosmic Doctrine can be found here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
72	The Witch of Criswell: An Ariel Moravec Occult Mystery		2023	Novel 17	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-second published book and the beginning of a new fiction series. I'd spent years being frustrated by the way that fantasy fiction ignored real magic and fixated on Harry Potter absurdities instead. Once I finished my tentacle novels, that had the inevitable result and gave rise to the first of a series of novels in which all the magic is the stuff real human beings in the real world can encounter. Ariel Moravec, the protagonist of the series, is an eighteen-year-old girl who goes to spend the summer with her grandfather, an occult initiate who spends his time investigating paranormal happenings. Before long she's caught up in one of his investigations, centering on legends of a colonial-era witch and a cascade of very real and vicious spells in the present day... There are two more novels in the series already in print, a third in press, and a fourth currently being written. It's turning into a very entertaining series to write and, I hope, to read. If you're interested, you can get copies of The Witch of Criswell here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
73	The Secret of the Five Rites		2023	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-third published book, and the result of an intellectual adventure that began forty-odd years ago when I first encountered a copy of that odd classic of American occultism, Peter Kelder's The Eye of Revelation. It taught a set of allegedly Tibetan exercises called the Five Rites. They weren't Tibetan, but it took me a long strange trip to find out exactly where they came from. In the process, I got to learn much more than I expected about the history of American occultism and the stranger corners of bodywork...and all of that found its way into this book of mine. Interested? You can get a copy here if you live in the US and here elsewhere.
74	The Way of the Four Elements: A Second Manual of Occult Training		2024	Golden Section	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-fourth published book, the sequel to The Way of the Golden Section, an adaptation of some aspects of John Gilbert's version of the Golden Dawn system to the Golden Section Fellowship. What that means in practice is that this book, The Way of the Four Elements provides a sequence of rituals, meditations, exercises, and practices keyed to the four elements of ancient magic and philosophy, which unfolds over the course of a year and builds on the material given in the earlier book. Rituals for the solstices and equinoxes, and the making and consecration of the four elemental working tools of the tradition -- the book of air, the wand of fire, the cup of water, and the pentacle of earth -- are among the things included. Interested? You can get a copy here in the US or here if you live elsewhere. (I recommend getting the hardback edition; if you do the work in this volume, you'll put heavy wear on your copy, and the hardback will stand up to that.)
75	The Book of Hataan: An Ariel Moravec Occult Mystery		2024	Novel 18	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-fifth published book, the sequel to The Witch of Criswell and thus the second Ariel Moravec occult mystery. Once again, it's eighteen-year-old Ariel and her adept grandfather on the case, investigating the theft of a rare magical book and a trail of clues that might lead to a pirate treasure hidden somewhere in the odd old East Coast port town of Adocentyn. Ariel and Dr. Bernard Moravec aren't the only ones on the trail, though, and the others will stop at nothing to get there first... In case you can't tell, yes, I'm having enormous fun with these. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere.
76	The Earth Mysteries Workbook: A One Year Course in the Enchantment of the Land		2024	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-sixth published book, the second workbook and fifth volume in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence of occult training textbooks. Earth mysteries, for those who aren't familiar with the term, is a catchall label for all the strange things associated with ancient ruins, folk traditions, places where paranormal things happen much more often than usual. The book on the right, John Michell's visionary masterpiece The View Over Atlantis, was my introduction to the field back in the day, as it was for so many other people -- it didn't hurt that the cover art was by Roger Dean, more famous for all that hallucinatory Yes album cover art -- and this book is partly my homage to Michell and a vanished era, partly a guide to integrating earth mysteries studies with occult training, and partly -- or mostly -- a hands-on guide to finding the weirdness in the place where you live. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere; I recommend the hardback if you're doing the course, because you're going to put a year of hard use into the book.
77	The Philosophy and Practice of Polarity Magic: The Secret Wisdom of Sex		2024	-	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-seventh published book, a study of the utterly unfashionable approach to sexual energies in magic that Dion Fortune and her fellow occultists of the Society of the Inner Light pioneered. You can always get a lot of interest by telling people to engage in orgiastic excess, and curiously enough, you can also get a lot of interest by telling people that sex is bad and God will spank them for thinking about it. Suggest something in between these extremes and nothing like so many people want to hear about it. Be that as it may, this is a practical handbook of magical practices that use redirected, sublimated erotic energies; the participants sit several feet from each other, usually with an altar in between them, and stay fully clothed. How dowdy? Nonetheless the methods work extremely well, and I give full details. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and here elsewhere.
78	The Hall of the Homeless Gods		2024	Novel 19	buy buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-eighth published book and nineteenth novel, a stand-alone (so far) tale set in 2095 or so. You could call it cli-fi (the current cute label for climate change fiction) if you like, or deindustrial SF; I'd call it a deindustrial noir Shinto science fiction spy thriller with Gnostic overtones. Jerry Shimizu, the two-fisted, gun-toting, half-Japanese tough guy who narrates the story, and the world in which he lives are interesting enough, at least to me, that he may get a sequel...but we'll see. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and here elsewhere.
79	The Astrology of Nations: A Manual of Political and Economic Astronomy		2025	Astrology	buy	The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-ninth published book, and those readers who have been following this journal for more than a few years already know a fair amount about it. It's a practical manual of political and economic astrology or, to use the traditional term, mundane astrology. Its intention is to teach people how to cast and interpret charts to predict the future of any country they desire. It's only been out for a little while, but initial feedback suggests that it does the job tolerably well. Interested? You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and via your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookshop elsewhere.

The HTML for the table above was created using this Google Sheet.

With help from the people on the Golden Section Forum, a list of abbreviations used on Ecosophia on Dreamwidth. Corrections and suggestions welcome!

Abbreviation	Meaning	Type	Years	System	Remarks
ADF	Ar nDraiocht Fein	Order		Druid	The the largest American Druid organization around 2004. JMG was a member between his time in OBOD and AODA
ADR	Arch Druid Report	Blog	2006-2017	-	JMG's original blog. Authorized copy with comments
AFA	Asatru Folk Assembly	Order		-	US based neopagan group with a website here
AMORC	Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis	Order		-	The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) of “California, U.S.A” placed its eyecatching ads on the back cover of every issue of Fate from 1963
AODA	Ancient Order of Druids in America	Order	2003-2015	Druid	One of the UGC traditions that JMG led, see the AODO website
APG	Art and Practice of Geomancy	Book	2009	Geomancy	Covers the same material as EDEM. Published by Red Wheel Weiser
AS	Academy of the Sword	Book	2006	-	A complete training course in rapier fencing based on Renaissance sacred geometry. It's the longest and most elaborate treatise on swordsmanship ever written, and one of the strangest, but I have it on good authority that the techniques work exceptionally well in practice -- yes, there are people who still practice old-fashioned rapier fencing.
BOL	Bridge of Love	Ritual		UGC	Introduced in The Modern Order of Essenes: Master Healer Grade Lessons 1
CC	Cabalistic Cross	Ritual		Golden Dawn	An opening and closing practice used at the beginning and end of many rituals. Meant to balance and energize the subtle body. Covered in Circles of Power
CGD	Celtic Golden Dawn	Book	2013	DOGD	Basic Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn book. Combines the symbolism and teachings of the Druid Revival with the magical techniques of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
CoP	Circles of Power	Book	1997	Golden Dawn	More advanced book on Golden Dawn operative magic
CosDoc	Cosmic Doctrine	Book	1949	-	Book by Dion Fortune
DA	Dolmen Arch	Book	2022	Druid	A fairly advanced two-volume reconstruction of a Druid correspondence course from the 1920s. Adapted and expanded with AODA-compatible materials. JMG taught the course privately to students before it was published
DF	Dione Fortune	Author		-	Author of The Doctrine of High Magic discussed in the book club, born Violet Mary Firth
DGH	Druid Grove Handbook	Book	2011	Druid	A guide to the ritual work of a grove (that's what you call a group of Druids) in AODA
DH	Druidry Handbook	Book	2006	Druid	Druidry handbook aimed at beginners. In order of difficulty: DP > DH > DMH. This book communicates the basic ideas of the Druid Revival. It was originally written to gain new members for AODA. First JMG book to hit the big time in terms of sales.
DIY	Do It Yourself	Shorthand		-	Information that helps you do things yourself
DMH	Druid Magic Handbook	Book	2008	Druid	Intermediate Druidry handbook. Its purpose is to help people make sense of Druid nature spirituality, which can be related to magic but doesn't have to be. JMG's first book on ritual magic that isn't basically a rehash of Golden Dawn practitice. In order of difficulty: DP > DH > DMH
DOGD	Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn	Order		DOGD	Golden Dawn and Druid fusion. The organization maintains a website
DP	Druid Path	Book	2022	Druid	Introduction to Druidry for total beginners. Part 11 of the publisher's "Modern Day Witch" series (although Druidry has nothing to do with Witches)
DRHM	Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic	Book	2017	Translation	Joint translation with Mark Mikitu of Lévi's masterpiece. Each chapter is discussed in a monthly post on Ecosophia
EDEM	Earth Divination, Earth Magic	Book	1999	Geomancy	Geomancy is an intriguing form of divination using sixteen four-digit binary numbers. They're combinations of one and two dots, but the mathematics are binary. It was one of the most common methods of divination in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Covers the same material as AGP. Published by AEON books
ENM	Encyclopedia of Natural Magic	Book	2005	-	About herbs, stones, incenses, oils and the philosophy behind them. Published by Llewellyn
EOTCR	Exercise of the Central Ray	Ritual		Celtic Golden Dawn	A further expansion and development of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. Mentioned in the book CGD.
FHR	Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose	Order		FHR	Not formal, descended from the formal Magickal Order of the Golden Dawn, material here
GBRP	Greater Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Described in the book CoP
GCC	Gnostic Celtic Church	Book	2013	Druid	A discussion of the Gnostic Celtic Church, its origins, and its training program, together with complete texts of its liturgies. GCC is AODA's religious branch (not to be mistaken for the UGC.)
GD	Golden Dawn	Order		Golden Dawn
GIRP	Greater Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Described in the book CoP
GIRH	Greater Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Described in the book CoP
GSF	Golden Section Fellowship	Order		Golden Section	Not a formal organization, descended from the UGC traditions
GW	Green Wizardry	Book	2013	Peak Oil	The 1970s ecological scene attempted to craft advanced technologies that could work within the limits of sustainability. This book was JMG's attempt to bring those back to the attention. Most successful of my books from the peak oil era.
HGA	Holy Guardian Angel	Shorthand		-	The transcendent spiritual self that mediates between the Divine Self and the Lower Personality and serves as guardian and guide. That contact is the first step in the Great Work (also known as the Knowledge and Conversation) that leads to integration, and thus to Initiation. This is the discovery of one’s True Will.
HOGD	Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn	Order		Golden Dawn	Founded in 1887, blew itself to smithereens in a series of pointless political quarrels between 1900 and 1902. One of multiple names for the Golden Dawn. HOGD was used by Yeats. Some info here.
IAO	Signs of Isis, Apophis and Osiris Risen	Ritual		-	Described in the book CoP
IIRC	If I Recall Correctly	Shorthand		-
INRI	Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm	Shorthand		-	Latin for "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews". INRI is said in "The Analysis of the Keyword" step of the LBRH. INRI can be expanded to other occult meanings, like "Igne Natvra Renovatvr Integra" - "By Fire, Nature is Perfectly Renewed"
IR	Into the Ruins	Magazine	2016-2020	-	Quarterly journal of postindustrial fiction. Edited by Joel Caris. Succeeded by New Maps. Website here
J	Judge	Shorthand		Geomancy	Part of a divination, like the Left and Right Witness
JMG	John Michael Greer	Writer		-	Current blogs at ecosophia.net and dreamwidth, used to blog at ADR
LARP	Live Action Role Playing	Activity		-	A term that originated for games where players take on the role of a character and interact with each other within the terms of a fictional scenario. Similar to tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, but 'acted out' by dressing up and moving around a physical space, rather than describing actions or representing them on a map. Sometimes used somewhat derisively to refer to actions seemingly taken in earnest that the speaker views as somehow fake or lacking substance.
LBRH	Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram	Banishing Ritual		Golden Dawn	Banishes any of the powers of the planets. Covered in Circles of Power
LBRP	Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram	Banishing Ritual		Golden Dawn	Banishes any of the powers of the elements. The Christian/Hermetic version is covered in Learning Ritual Magic; the Druid Revival version in the The Celtic Golden Dawn.
LIRP	Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram	Basic Invoking/Banishing		Golden Dawn	Invokes any of the powers of the elements. The Christian/Hermetic version is covered in Learning Ritual Magic; the Druid Revival version in the The Celtic Golden Dawn.
LLM	Large Language Model	Shorthand		-	The technology behind 2023 "arteficial intelligence"
LMP	Lesser Middle Pillar	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Described in the book CoP
LRM	Learning Ritual Magic	Book	2004	Golden Dawn	Solid introduction to Golden Dawn-style ritual magic for solo practitioners. Good first step before tackling Circles of Power. Written for a magical lodge in the Seattle area. Co-authored by two other senior lodge members, Clare Vaughn and Earl King Jr. Published by Red Wheel Weiser
LRP	Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram	Basic Invoking/Banishing		Golden Dawn
LSRP	Lesser Summoning Ritual of the Pentragram	Basic Invoking/Banishing		Golden Dawn	Another name for Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram (LIRP)
LVX	Fraternity of the Hidden Light	Order		-	Fraternitas L.V.X. Occulta is Latin for Fraternity of the Hidden Light. Website here
MM	Magic Monday	Blog		-	Weekly Q&A where JMG answers questions about magic
MOE	Modern Order of Essenes	Order		UGC	Has a series of optional attunements being transmitted but otherwise not formal. Links: blogs, PDFs, sounds, and forum
Monsters	Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings	Book	2001	-	JMG's experience investigating reports of monstrous entities near the Puget Sond area. This was for some years the one place in print you could find out that there's a very lively werewolf tradition among the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington -- you know, near Forks.
MP	Middle Pillar	Ritual		Golden Dawn
MTLE	Mystery Teachings of the Living Earth	Book	2012	-	Inspried by The Kybalion, this book offers seven basic principles that are applicable to ecology and occultism equally: the laws of the Whole, Flow, Balance, Limits, Cause and Effect, Planes and Evolution
NM	New Maps	Magazine		-	Quarterly journal of realistic future fiction. Started January 2021. Edited by Nathanael Bonnell. Successor to Into the Ruins. Website here
OBOD	Order of Bards Ovates and Druids	Order		OBOD	A druid tration like AODA. info here
OCD	Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder	Shorthand		-	A disorder in which a person experiences uncontrollable and recurring thoughts (obsessions), engages in repetitive behaviors (compulsions), or both.
OP	Original Poster	Shorthand		-	The forum user who started the thread
OPO	Ordo Peregrini Orientem	Order		-	Imaginary order from another timeline where Carl Jung and Herman Hesse swap places with Violet Firth and Aleister Crowley. It's based on OTO and the name is Latin for "Order of Journeyers to the East". It would have been founded in 1921 by the influential Swiss occultists Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse. See this Ecosophia blog or reddit.
OPW	Occult Philosophy Workbook	Book	2022	Golden Section / Druid	GSF book (can be used on its own)
OSA	Order of Spiritual Alchemy	Order		OSA	Has a website, also contains copies of FHR and MOE materials
OTO	Ordo Templi Orientis	Order		-	An occult secret society and hermetic magical organization founded at the beginning of the 20th century. The origins of O.T.O. can be traced back to the German-speaking occultists Carl Kellner, Theodor Reuss, Heinrich Klein, and Franz Hartmann. Mentioned here here
PGM	Papyri Graecae Magicae	Shorthand		-	"Papyri Graecae Magicae" is Latin for "Greek Magical Papyri", where papyri is ancient Egyptian paper. They contain magical spells, formulae, hymns, and rituals written between 100 BCE and 400 CE.
PoW	Paths of Wisdom	Book	1996	Golden Dawn	Instructional manual of the Cabala, a core philosophical system of Golden Dawn Western occult tradition. JMG's first published book. For beginners Learning Ritual Magic is more suitable.
QC	Qabalistic Cross	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Alternative spelling of Cabalistic Cross (see CC)
R+C	Rose Cross	Ritual		Golden Dawn	Specific, standalone ritual to call down specific positive energies into all the levels of the self as a form of blessing. Covered in Circles of Power. Mentioned on Magic Monday.
RO&C	Ritual of Opening and Closing	Ritual		-	Mentioned in Circles of Power, from a book by Gareth Knight, either Occult Exercises and Practices or The Practice of Ritual Magic
RW	Right Witness	Shorthand		Geomancy	Part of a divination, like the Judge and the Left Witness
SGO	Sacred Geometry Oracle	Book	2002	Golden Section	Set of divination cards. Greatly improved version released in 2022. Required for GSF work (can be used on its own)
SoP	Sphere of Protection	Invoking + Banishing		Golden Section / Druid	A version that works with any set of deitiies or impersonal powers is covered in The Druid Magic Handbook. The Golden Section variant is covered in The Way of the Golden Section
SP	Solar Plexus	Ritual		Golden Section	Book about SP mentioned here
SRIA	Societas Rosicrucianis in Anglia	Order		SRIA	One of the orders joined by Arthur Edward Waite, co-author of the Rider-Waite tarot deck
TADR	Arch Druid Report	Blog		-	See ADR
TCM	Traditional Chinese Medicine	Shorthand		-
TSW	This Stuff Works	Saying		-	The S has a stronger interpretation and is often said in shock. Seen here
UB	Universal Bond	Order		UB	One of the most active Druid organizations in Britain in 1954 (seen here)
UGC	Universal Gnostic Church	Order		UGC	currently dormant; not to be mistaken for the GCC
W4E	Way of the Four Elements	Book	2024	Golden Section	A one year course for students of the occult to expand their horizons through the study of fire, air, water, and earth.
WGS	Way of the Golden Section	Book	2021	Golden Section	Core GSF book, requires the SGO
WOG	Well of Galabes	Blog	2014-2017	-	Blog on magic. Archived under "Blogs, Essays, FAQs" on ecosophia.net
WON	Wealth of Nature	Book	2011	-	Book about why the "science" of economics yields such consistently wrong answers when tasked with questions about peak oil and the impending decline of industrial civilization. Partly assembled from posts on the Arch Druid report. Inspired by E.F. Schumacher's classic Small is Beautiful.