jprussell | (Reply)

From:

1) On Hotel Concierge - I've been chugging through the archive since your recommendation, and the comparison to sam[]zdat was apt - a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses, and insights in similar areas. I just finished reading The Tower, and yeah, that's gonna have to get integrated into my thinking about aesthetics.

2a) Yeah, I agree that I've been a bit disappointed on finding other contemporary occultists via JMG and his commentariat, except sometimes in the form of book recommendations - such as JMG's recent link to the Humoral Herbal, which looks very promising, but is not written in an area I have time to take on right now.

2b) On Christopher Alexander, wrathofgnon, and similar, don't really get much into religion, much less occultism, but both are examples of folks who aren't afraid to bring values, and sometimes even "spirituality" into the discussion. The closest Christopher Alexander gets to directly writing about the spiritual is his four part book series "The Nature of Order", which I have but have only glanced through. I don't know if he would have had a literally spiritual explanation, or a fundamentally materialist one that shook out to "acting spiritual". As for wrathofgnon, he approvingly quotes G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and openly admires cathedrals, so I suspect he's some flavor of Tradcath, or at least appreciates what they're about, but he doesn't tend to get directly into spiritual matters, more just adjacent, by talking about beauty and quoting folks who make more explicit connections, like Sir Roger Scruton.

3) I read The Way of Initiation by Steiner, as recommended by JMG as a good starting point. I also listened to a bunch of Hermitix podcast episodes interviewing folks interested in Steiner (one academic who wrote his disertation about him and one guy at the less-fundamentalist end of active Anthroposophy).

4a) Ah, I have Cesiwr Serith's A Book of Pagan Prayer and have gotten some use there, so I'll have to check out his other work.

4b) All three of these are new to me, so thank you!

4c) I recognize Kenaz Filan's name, but haven't checked out any of his own writings

4d) I enjoyed the "Rune Soup" interview with JMG and branched out to a few others, such as him interviewing Rune Rasmussen (Nordic Animism) and Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk). He sounded like someone capable of having a reasonable disagreement about this kind of stuff, which is itself a rare and valuable skill

4e) Thanks for the specific links, I enjoyed those and from them King sounds reasonable and like he's focused on the right things, which I wouldn't have expected if you or someone else had just said "oh, he writes about the Goetia".

5) ::smacks forehead:: I completely forgot to mention the very person who first sent me down the rabbit hole of "you make a lot of sense in other areas, and now you're talking about magic?" which was Eric S. Raymond, hacker of the old school. Unsurprisingly, most of his stuff is about tech, but he's also an enthusiastic libertarian and gun nut. More surprisingly, he apparently does/used to engage in Neopagan/Wiccan rituals from a "this is all just a non-obvious way to get certain things out of my subconscious" materialist standpoint. He has written about that far less than his other subjects, but he has this FAQ and this essay which for a long time served as my beachhead in the world of the occult, though my approach has moved rather far from here over the years.