Behold! Presented to you, bold reader, in suitably sinister font, it’s the latest brand-new retro phenomena on the occult scene today – talismanic publishing! Roll up, roll up for your fine edition, bound in toad skin tome. These are beautiful objects, sacred and talismanic publications (which we’d like to sell to YOU). They will look so much cooler in your library than your battered copy of 777, your spiral bound copy of  Sorcery as Virtual Mechanics or those dodgy Carlos Castenda paperbacks. Visit our website! Check out the skulls, the stark quality graphic design and sense that, finally, this is it! You’ve seen The Ninth Gate, now for just <<insert amount in dollars and link to paypal here>> you can hold real magick in your hands!

According to Balkan’s Arcane Bindings it’s been said we are in a new ‘Golden Age’ of occult publishing, at least as far as fine talismanic production is concerned. But should we judge a book by its cover?

Now please understand I like fine edition books. In fact I’ve stopped paying into a pension scheme and started buying them instead because I feel they represent a much better investment. I figure that in the future I’ll be able to sell my collection to pay for my dotage. I’ll be able to shuffle off this mortal coil at an advanced age, having flogged my collection, to pay for all the kindly nurses, holidays in the sun, sex, drugs etc which I hope to enjoy in my old age. However if, to quote Jim Morrison, ‘the whole shithouse goes up in flames’. I will at least have some nice acid-free paper that I can burn in order to keep warm as I struggle through the radioactive wasteland looking for tinned food.

I’ve produced talismanic editions myself. Some years ago an enterprising chap asked me and my co-author Greg Humphries to produce some ‘talismanic’ (his words) copies of Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick. We did this by obtaining 30 copies from our publisher Mandrake of Oxford and then writing additional notes and creating original artworks, by hand, directly in those copies. (Having done a brief websearch I can’t see any of these left for sale and so I
confidently predict they will be worth a fortune by now.)

Some of the new wave of talismanic publishing might be traced back to the work of Kenneth Grant. Kenny G. certainly had style and his original Typhonian Trilogy (nice hardbacks with a smart lamen of The-Occult- Order-formerly-know- as-the-Typhonian-OTO on the spine) was groundbreaking stuff. I did have a set of the first editions once, lovely books. Read them when I was 14 and was well hooked by the eldritch magick which Kenny G. promulgated from his unknown atavistic transmission blah blah blah… Anyhow I sold them years later because, while they were cool, they didn’t really have much to offer except their style which I’d already grokked fully. Grant’s work became prized, the reprints of classics like Nightside of Eden and Outside The Circles of Credability simply flew off the shelves. When Kenny started pumping out his later work, like Beyond The Mauve Zone (now on Amazon for £550), it was being snapped up. It was obvious that there was money to be made and that magicians can’t resist a well produced, left hand path stylee monograph.

As a practitioner one of the problems I see with the current ‘golden age’ of fine occult publishing is that most of the books which I’ve encountered just don’t work for me. If I look in my physical library it’s the battered paperbacks which are the books I use repeatedly, not the fine editions that I own. In fact lots of the talismanic books I’ve encountered are both retro in their content as well as their style. Personally I don’t give a hoot (or ‘howl’) what number of legions of spirits there are in the Grand Grimoire of Some Old Git from Dayez of Yore. Neither do I care whether his sigillum doth looke like a cat being buggered with an coathanger surmounted by a badger skull rampant. I don’t care about the so-called Traditional Craft with its radical re-interpretation of which elements go in which quarters and the oh-so-mysterious arcanum of having the pointy stang of Tubby-Cain among its paraphernalia. So I guess the corpus of literature from this stream of the ‘golden age’ of occult publishing just isn’t for me, at least in terms of finding texts that I return to again and again.

Now I’m not saying there are not great books in fine editions. And there are certainly some good publishers out there. Scarlet Imprint for example have begun to release their material in fine, paperback and ebook formats and if the material is really aimed at practitioners, not just collectors, this makes total sense.

Fine art objects that many of the ‘talismanic’ offerings are, they are just that – art objects. I like a nice bit of vellum and gold leaf as much as the next wizard. I’ve worked with both substances and so appreciate the skill required. But in Balkan’s blog and on a facebook discussion today there’s appears to be a certain amount of wringing of hands about these books being re-sold for ‘astronomical ‘ prices and collected by people who are not really into the occult. But that’s what happens to art when it becomes commodity. I really can’t understand how people in this game wouldn’t expect this to happen to their beautifully crafted volumes. And since it’s my pension plan I’m delighted to see the early signs are that I’m making good investments. Hail capitalism! Hail Satan!

Personally I think that books like PiHKAL and TiKHAL are more interesting as grimoires (and have more genuinely useful diagrams) than The Sworn Book of Who-ever, however tasty the binding.  And I want to inhabit a magick that doesn’t look like a medieval parody of obfuscation, or worse, a triumph of style over substance.  Magick should certainly draw on its rich past, but while we’re busy Hoodooing it up and pretending to be Creole slaves, or  hinting darkly that Cunning Craft is an ancient lineage, maybe we should be looking to the future rather more? A grimoire, to make any sense to me as a practitioner, needs be a grammar of the language of now. Where in all this old skool puff is the neuroscience? The psychology? Indeed where exactly did the 20th century of magical culture go, let alone an engagement with the 21st?

Magick as a praxis only develops by doing, so whether it’s a a slim volume from the Aquarian Press Paths to Inner Power series or a finely tooled Enochian tome, whatever inspires us to actual work is good. And as I’ve explained I’m all for fine editions as art objects. My library is looking pretty sexy this days with hardcore booknography. I also get to keep them in mint condition because, for the most part, these are not the books that get a good thumbing.

As I wrote earlier today on Facebook :

I once flogged a first edition Azoetia which was dedicated by Andrew Chumbley to me. Nice book in many ways (mostly ’cause it was a gift), and I guess worth $$$ now, but not the sort of thing that I’d bother re-reading so it was fair game to go. The fact I could flog it for more money now is, frankly, the only reason I miss it.

I’d rather have a sense that the information I’m getting in a book is cutting edge, embedded and alive in real-world culture now, than worry about it’s physical dimensions and binding style. It’s the information that for me is the magick in a book, but if people want to collect the wrappers then, as a collector, I say ‘bring it on!’

Check out the real alchemists using the practical grimoires mentioned in this post here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs6h7XX5T8U

and a link to a fine edition of that classic The Necronomicon here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnbYcB9ctu8

JV

‘What is the relationship between psychology and modern magic?’ was a question asked of me by a friend recently. There are many ways one could look at that relationship. There is the broad historical relationship between magic (as ‘natural philosophy’) and science in general. There is the general point that psychology is literally the study of the soul and therefore one might argue that ancient and modern religious and esoteric thought has always had something to say on these matters. One might alternatively look at the uneasy relationship between modern experimental (often laboratory based) psychology and psychoanalysis. But, if we stick to the terms of the question in that it’s ‘modern magic’ we’re interested in, we can explore what I think maybe the underlying assumption; that magic is a specialist form of applied psychology.

Frater U.’.D.’. famously defined a series of magical paradigms here in the form of the spirit, energy, psychological, information and meta models (HERE). Although many of the principles that Frater U.’.D.’. ascribes to the psychological model are perhaps more properly thought of as psychoanalytic he does, in my view, correctly suggest that this model has been the favourite of English speaking magicians, especially since the 1970’s. Chaos magic usually considers the ‘core technology’ of magic to be belief-shifting and gnosis and both these principles can be most readily understood as psychological processes rather than the activities of spirits or energy. In this essay the author hints that beyond the traditional chaos magic twin-pillars of belief/gnosis there lies the information model that does not rely on trance techniques and  (like anything new) is double-plus good. He also mentions the meta-model, which is pragmatic utilitarianism, and in practice is how many magicians engage with their practice.

My own view is that psychological understanding is a major component in the ontological field within which modern magic takes place. It’s the basic cultural landscape in which our rituals and practices happen. Even people that are adopting a highly spiritist model of magic (and this seems, of late, to have become terribly fashionable) must perforce live in a world where psychology is ‘the Daddy’ now. Our language is shot through with Freudian, Jungian and Skinnerian terminology. Our world is governed by an awareness of human psychology; in advertising, in law and even in those little details of life like the fact that your ATM gives the card back first rather than dispensing your money for (psychologically) obvious reasons. Psychology as a science continues the de-centring process that has been critical in the narrative of the post-Medieval world. In astronomy once we realised that Earth goes round the Sun we lost our position in the centre of the cosmos. Once we understood evolution we lost our place as the pinnacle of God’s creation and became just another animal. Once we began to appreciate that there is both consciousness and then there are all those unconscious processes at work, even our self-awareness was knocked off centre stage.

For magicians this de-centring of the self isn’t such a big problem as we tend to have a much bigger definition of ‘self’ than the narrow sliver of waking awareness we call consciousness. I heard a lecture from Michael Staley (of The Order formally known as the Typhonian OTO) a couple of years ago where he pointed out that magic was a process where the unconscious ‘tides’ were more important than (conscious) will. He suggested that magical acts only really work when they are what the unconscious wants and that the wise magician pays attention (as far as one can to unconscious phenomena) to these tides and attempts to swim with them. For any magickal operation, said Mr Staley, there is the possibility of it working, or not working, or of working in reverse. Pointing out that you’d never use a gun that behaved like this, he suggested that most magick should be about listening to the unconscious and doing its will. In many ways this is what Crowley was going on about with his idea of True Will. Putting aside the more metaphysical interpretations of the Will, Crowley was interested in enacting one’s unconscious drives. His idea was that, unfettered by social restriction, the unconscious would well up, turning every man and woman into a genius, driven by his or her daemon (on the classical sense), and everything would be groovy. Reason was ‘a lie’ and ‘Because’ was ‘accursed’. The apparent nativity of this proposal can be forgiven when we consider that Crowley lived in a world of Victorian prudery, hypocrisy and Freudianism. He understandably imagined that the choking strictures of social convention were what was holding us back from a Golden Age. No wonder he is one of the ‘people we like’ in the famous montage for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the hero of the radical 1960s.

Today we might have a more nuanced view. Aided by the fantastic breakthroughs in neurology, and decades of brilliant experimental psychology, we now have a much better idea of how humans really work. And, while we may still use terms like left and right brain, introvert and extrovert etc, most of us admit to a much more complex and indeed malleable model of the psyche, especially in relation to the social environment.

This malleability is where magic comes in. As well as understanding better how our minds work we have also gone on to develop many more ways of changing them. The number of therapeutic systems which psychology has provided are legion (even if we only stick to those considered ‘main stream’). As agents of change these techniques are magical in that they allow us to change how we see the world and thus (at the very least in a subjective sense) the world itself. Psychology, especially experimental psychology, represents one of the best approaches we have to mapping ourselves, and by having better maps we can better determine where we want to (or can) be. (and of course educate ourselves in how others may wish use these tricks to change our minds for us.)

There is nothing at all wrong about familiarising oneself with ancient maps of the soul. Whether it is the Qabalah, the Nine Worlds or something else that tickles your fancy. But the modern magician should also be familiar with some of the key findings of experimental psychology. Certainly a familiarity with psychoanalytics is essential to understand the work of Crowley, Fortune, Grant, Spare et al. It’s also essential to appreciate some of the most interesting and innovative deployments of magic in the modern age. These include such gems as the psychomagic of Alejandro Jodorowsky   or those brilliant TOPY videos with Derek Jarman.

So rather than see psychology as a retreat for magic, a sad admission that ‘it’s all in our heads, we can appreciate it as providing a wonderful new cartographic tool that, in only just over a century, has thrown up a wide variety of technologies for the discerning magician. It’s also, whether we like it or not, the language of the modern (post) industrialised age. As magicians, if we are to be empowered in this world, we must know how to speak this language fluently.

JV