books | The Blog of Baphomet

Well, after some years of writing and polishing the manuscript, incorporating feedback and observations for innumerable friends and allies, and spending long hours at the computer my, ahem, magnum opus, is ready for publication!

Phew!

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Check out the cool mandala on the cover!

While my name is on the cover, this work is another collaborative venture. It includes a range of strategies to hold and direct the psychedelic experience and many of these have been things I’ve learnt from shamans, witches, magicians and many others. I’ve been honoured to take part in ceremony with people who hold lineages in the use of psychedelic medicines going back thousands of years. I’ve also learnt methods from some fabulous people in the more modern esoteric schools of Thelema, Wicca, Druidry and Chaos Magic. What I offer in Getting Higher is my understanding of the wisdom of these various practitioners.

I’m also very pleased to have my practice and understanding informed by people working in the fields of medical and scientific research on psychedelics. I’m especially grateful to the organizers of Breaking Convention which biennially provides a conference of three days of glorious intellectual and cultural reflection on psychedelic consciousness. If you want to understand and connect with the emerging psychedelic renaissance then you need a ticket now.

I’m very pleased to have had the support of the wonderful Psychedelic Press UK, and their arch editor Nikki Wyrd. I’m also honoured to have the legendary Pete Loveday as the illustrator for the book. Pete is a wonderful chap and frankly something of childhood hero. His Plain Rapper and Big Bang comics in the latter part of the 20th century cast a wry psychoactive eye over the culture of festival scene, The Peace Convoy, drugs, and authoritarian Tory rule (plus ça change). All Pete’s work is hand painted and the detail of the design is amazing. If people are interested I’ll see if I can get prints (or even perhaps blotter art) sorted out.

We’re having a book launch at The October Gallery in London on the 25th of April and you are warmly invited. The evening will be convened by the phenomenal Dr David Luke who graciously provided the foreword for this book.

Advanced orders for Getting Higher are being taken now for a May 1st publication date. Kindle and all that jazz will follow in due course.

Eagle eyed visitors to this blog (and thank you gentle reader, we’ve had over quarter of a million views to date) will have spotted the Getting Higher link. This is where I’m hoping to post resources for people who are engaged in entheogenic ceremony. As it says on the page, if you want to contribute to these resources in any way please get in touch.

Finally another thank you. To all the medicine carriers, all the spirits, all the magic that surrounds us everyday. Whether we use entheogens to notice this magic, or breathwork, or silence, or gardening, or a thousand other ways, may we all wake to remember the wonder of the world. Thank you Great Mystery for this.

Ahoy!

PS – here’s a video trailer for the book. Enjoy your marketing experience, and thank you 🙂

Enjoy Sex (How, when and IF you want to): A Practical and Inclusive Guide

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Frankly if you like your sexual self-help replete with pencil drawings of bearded blokes and their female partners trying to get pretzel-like in search of “better sex” this book is a bit rubbish. I can see from the back-cover author snap that Justin has a beard but that’s as far as it goes. By contrast what Enjoy Sex… gives us is powerful tool for exploring what is might mean for us as human beings to explore intimacy with both others and ourselves.

Visitors to this blog will already know that I’m a bit of a Meg-John fan boy! As well as writing this review for their recent graphic non-fiction book Queer (in collaboration with the brilliant Julia Scheele). I also wrote a review several years ago for their first relationship opus Rewriting the Rules. In that book Meg-John sought to challenge us to consider the societal stories and familial conditioning that we might have received concerning intimacy, gender and friendship. In a compassionate and accessible manner they asked us to honestly explore what we really wanted for ourselves and those to whom we are connected.

In many ways Enjoy Sex… feels like an organic expansion of this previous work. We find chapters looking at the messages we receive about sex and how the sex advice industry often compounds powerful ideas about perfection, performance and a penis in vagina (PIV) end game. This is a book that beautifully inverts the presumed heteronormativity of most sex advice and openly revels in diversity. Each chapter incorporates multiple voices of people exploring intimacy and I loved the richness and complexity that these added to the themes under consideration.

Both of these authors bring their considerable wealth of experience as educators and activists to the format of this work. Justin has worked for over two decades in providing meaningful sex education to young people and Meg-John is renowned as a lucid communicator and advocate for sexual and gender diversity. This book is accessible without dumbing down and provides a whole host of exercises and activities for helping the reader dig into their own reflections and explorations.

This is a book that places self-understanding and consent at its centre. In order to access the type of intimacy that we may or may not want with others, we must first reconnect to our own bodies and the stories that our culture and experience have passed to us. In order to act compassionately and consensually towards others we must first exercise proper self-care in understanding what we value for our selves in this present moment. This is a book that seeks to move mindfulness from the meditation cushion and into the realm of our whole lives. In contrast to so much touted as “spiritual” sex, the erotic realities of solo sex, porn and consensual non-monogamies are explored as possible means for more fully “knowing thyself”.

In a world where the tyranny of performance and perfection threaten to disconnect ourselves from truly engaging with deep sensuality, Justin and Meg-John have provided us with an accessible tool-kit for tuning in to our own unique version of the erotic. A truly liberating work!