Available HERE . How do you write a review of a book which is about spiritual enlightenment, awakening, attainment, initiation or whatever you wish to call it? And not just about awakening, but an actual full scheme for attaining it? I shall of course outline the contents, but what about evaluating what is written here? I shall also try to give some of the flavour of Chapman’s teachings; but sadly for those who hate cliches, it really is the case that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Ultimately, what draws a student to a teacher is itself part of the mystery. It seems to me that I can only evaluate what Alan Chapman is presenting as someone who has practiced the system; the only laboratory in which such writings can be tested is that of personal experience. So I shall have to tell my own Magia story. The book is a transcript of teachings delivered over six days at a retreat in Greece. It consists of those twelve sessions, with some unpacking, all rendered in blank v...
It's got quite a range of offerings, not all of which were to my taste; but of course that's how it is with anthologies. Personal takes on the history of CM from Pete Carroll and Jaq Hawkins, some good articles full of basic practical hints, and just for variety, one of those pieces which tell you how you must do magic. Lionel Snell is of course represented, with a great piece, Virtual Reality, Cybermagick and the Future of Chaos , resuming one of the main themes of his work over the last 50 years - VR. He is the man who invented Johnstone's Paradox, the idea that, if it's ever going to be actually possible to upload human-level consciousness into computers, then the odds are we are already living in such an emulation. This theory is now claimed without attribution by shameless plunderers of Lionel's originality. The essay ends with this computer analogy, symbolizing coding as magic, and the consensus world as the desktop: 'The moral of m...
This is an unusual book. Toby Chappell, whose background includes academic studies in philosophy and linguistics, introduces arcane ideas from semiotics into the field of magic, but doesn’t leave it at that. The subtitle of the book - ‘Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils’ - tells us that the book is intended, as all decent books on magic do, to improve our magical practice. When Chappell gets on to the analyses of magical spells, it becomes clear that we are in the hands of an experienced magician. The author’s other writings include his book Infernal Geometry and the Left Hand Path. The early sections of the book where he introduces the semiotics of Pierce and Saussure, amongst other writers, were hard going for me; I find abstract thought goes in one ear and out the other until I manage to connect it to actual concrete experience. This difficulty is no reflection on Chappell’s skills in expounding these obscure ideas, and I feel like I understand them a little...
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