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The Languages of Magic: Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols and Sigils, by Toby Chappell

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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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Crab and Bees Matter of Britain

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CRAB AND BEES MATTER OF BRITAIN by Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith. Peakrill Press This is a thoroughly hallucinatory book. It starts like this: It was all snakes. Nothing was straight.  From the opening sentences we plunge into a world of myth, where stories that maybe resemble those in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century book History of the Kings of Britain , or tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table intertwine with near-contemporary linear-world characters and events. Echoes of the Flood that inundated many places at the end of the last Ice Age bump up against contemporary tales, Harold Wilson going to Scilly to die. This book confuses the centuries and mashes up the millennia, showing us how myth might grow from overheard inaccurate pub conversations. And it’s all spiced with the pungent intellectual delight of playful false etymology.  It’s a rich cosmology. ‘The wind, the warmth, the water and the soil moved in circles, tangling with the stories in cir...
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Anglo-Saxon Paganism: History and Beliefs by Jamie Lang

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The book was given me by my friend Anwen who runs Airy Fairy, Sheffield's premier pagan bookshop, meeting place and cafe. It was written by her friend Jamie and features a Freya painting modelled on Anwen on the front cover.  So this is a book that came out of a community that overlaps my own local magical one, and I wanted to give it a thorough review.  And it is well worth the effort. It's an unusual and, in its own way, groundbreaking book.  But it’s taken me years to do. First the book went missing when I was moving house two years ago. Then… well, enough of excuses. The review is finally here.  Anglo-Saxon Paganism consists of essays about the history and myths of the Anglo-Saxon world plus the author’s own versions of the mythic tales. The book is a rich offering, with nice attention to history and useful timelines to contextualize the origins of AS culture. I’m going to dive into the bits of the text I particularly engaged with before discussing the book’s sh...
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Inbetween the Lines: Essays on Occulture, Magic, and Seductive Zombie Strippers by Carl Abrahamsson

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As you probably know, Carl Abrahamsson is editor of The Fenris Wolf , the occasional occultural journal which has been blending magic(k), avant garde art and psychotherapy since 1989. Abrahamsson is a ferociously productive writer, whose output is nigh-impossible to keep up with with—essays, talks, films, books and more. He describes his approach as ‘anthropological’; he often frames occultural things as aspects of a more universal human quality or other.   In one of these essays, ‘The Magic of Dreams’, he tells us the overall frame of his magical life:  ‘The key to a good life was (and is) simply to control your own time, and never flex away too much from the insight that Time is a currency strongly linked to our perception of freedom. True Will needs to be merged with Time, that’s a solid formula for successful magic.’ I can relate to that a lot. Being able to control one’s own time is the polar opposite of the corporate work nightmare that we are supposed to accept as norma...
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The Abkhazian Letters by George Rose

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‘The book contains correspondence between myself and the Elder Murat Yagan. The Elder Murat Yagan was one of the last remaining custodians of the traditional culture and practices of the Abkhazian people. These previously restricted practices are better known in the West as "The Yoga of the Caucuses". The book also describes the experiences of a small London based community that were committed to the work of G I Gurdjieff and J G Bennett. There is additional material on the art of dreaming, healing practices and the activation of the Nests (energy centres) that improve health and develop reserve human abilities. The cover photo was taken in the earlier part of the last century. The image presented was the theme and topic of one of my final letters to the Elder Murat Yagan. That letter is included in this book.’ As you my readers may have noticed, I don’t generally write bad reviews. This is because I don’t review things if I don’t think they’ve any value, though I occasionall...
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EXPANDING MINDSCAPES, ed Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

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  If you’re interested in the history of psychedelics you’ll probably have read Lee and Shlain’s Acid Dreams and Stevens’ Storming Heaven for the American experience, and Andy Roberts’ Albion Dreaming and Acid Drops for the UK history, but I bet you’ve not read much about acid in South America. Or China, or Pakistan, or Israel.  In this collection we get a massive broadening of history.  I heard about the book via UK's excellent acid historian Andy Roberts, who told me my name was in it, in an article about acid and anarchism in the 1970s. This was something I wrote in 2015 for a local history website about the Broomhall area of Sheffield, where I lived in the early 1970s. For six months I was a member of a commune, in a 3-bedroom terraced house, with people who were active in the UK anarchist scene. Many of whom were keen on LSD, which we had a plentiful supply of.  So I had to buy the book. It was a very odd feeling to re-read quotes from my article in which ou...
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Set Controls for the Heart of the Sun, by Neil Rushton

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This novel starts out with the protagonist having a very hard time. He is skint and mentally ill. He gets a new psychiatrist who is involved in radical experimentation with psychedelic medicines. Some of which will be familiar, and others not. The story engages with one of the biggest issues in psychedelic healing, or any kind of mental therapy - to what society are we returning these ‘healed’ people, and how much of their distress was down to what is happening in the world, the shitstorm of the Neoliberal Empire? And further, might a 'healee' actually be a person who has something other people do not? Might the healing be ‘just’ a side-effect, not the most important part of the transformation? If healing is the icing on the cake, what is the cake?  Another issue in the tale is the old dream, simply articulated in the lines of Country Joe and the Fish’s classic track ‘Bass Strings’, that if we only took enough acid often enough, we’d never come down. It did seem like this was r...
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