Calliope

A poem from later in Yeats' life, and in fact from a book he published called The Tower, explicitly about growing old, "All Souls' Night" is, well, what it sounds like it is, Yeats reflecting as he sets out a glass of wine for the spirits.

Without going crazy and losing the thread of a "bite" here, Yeats was an occultist, formerly in the Golden Dawn, and still experimenting with automatic writing and other things even afterwards. I'm telling you that because he brings up MacGregor, who was MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Golden Dawn.

For in my first hard springtime we were friends.

It's perhaps a stretch to label this one as gothic, but I really wanted to include it, because it's a somber reflection of what it means to live beyond the lives of others, to speak to the ghosts in the room.

Dion Fortune was a practicing occultist, formerly of the Golden Dawn, and founder of the Society of the Hidden Light, which still exists today. She wrote on practical magic, esoteric topics, Qabalah, and so on. She's most famous for Psychic Self-Defense, probably. But she also wrote a good amount of fiction, and it's all quite good. "Blood-Lust" is a story in a collection titled The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, an occult detective written in the wake of John Silence's popularity.

Fortune intended her fiction to be read alongside her practical and theoretical works. She claims, in the introduction to Taverner, that every story is based on something that really happened, and she's actually toned it down so the stories will sound more plausible. Whether you practice occultism or not, though, the stories are good. In this one, a "vampire" accompanies a soldier back from WW1.

Essential Spinoza: Ethics &c (Morgan ed, Shirley trans)

Siigggghhh. The really irritating thing is that I agree with a number of Spinoza's conclusions, but I don't agree with a lot of his premises. And in my cursory attempt to look into secondary literature on Spinoza, everyone seems to comment on how he's the most internally consistent, rigorous ethical philosopher ever. And, I mean... Garbage in, garbage out, kids. His ideas on the need to make everyone's life better, and how he slips in this tiny little comment that, since no individual human could possibly care for everyone, it's the state's job to do so... yeah, big same, Baruch, big same.

Carmen Astrologicum (Dorotheus)

Oof. The HHoL server's #weekly-astrology channel switched from discrete lessons to a text reading, and my friend Andrew, the pro astrologer who leads that channel, hadn't read Dorotheus yet, but thought it would be a good text. It... wasn't -- which he's said himself! It's very short; Andrew has compared it to the lecture notes a teacher might write for their own use, as compared to something like that Mathesis, which is the book a teacher writes to teach others in their stead. If you're really into classical astrology you'll probably need to read Dorotheus eventually, but definitely don't read it as an intro text.

Tree of Life (Regardie)

Overall I liked this book, though Regardie leans on Theosophy way too much for my taste. Later in life he backed away from it, but he felt he should present new editions of the book as they were when he first wrote them, save obviously fixing any errors or such. In another book, Garden of Pomegranates, he briefly discusses in an appended introduction that he didn't really buy what Blavatsky was selling anymore, but as in this book, he did at the time.

Setting that aside, this is the book he wrote before he actually joined the Stella Matutina and got access to Golden Dawn papers, so it's a really interesting mixture of Iamblichus, Crowley, and (ugh) Theosophy. The simplest, coolest idea in the book is that you can just vibrate god names at the end of a ritual just to, well, vibe with them, lol.

Magical Writings of Florence Farr

As I said for last month's entry, I think Farr may have been one of the people in the Golden Dawn who actually knew what she was talking about. This is a collection of her essays on magic and the like, though inexplicably the editor also included her "calendar," a booklet with a literary quotation for every day of the year. It's a waste of space. Aside from that, though, the essays are stimulating, interesting, and incisive, even if I don't agree with every bit of every one of them.

House of the Hidden Light (Machen & Waite)

Machen is best known for his weird fiction, including "The Great God Pan," which effectively invented the literary Pan figure we know now. Waite is best known for designing and orchestrating the Waite-Smith tarot. Both were in the Golden Dawn, albeit Machen was in very briefly, before following Waite to his new order and eventually sort of not pursuing ceremonial magic. But, as the intro and notes point out, he still practiced some weird shit, like self-hypnosis techniques.

This book is a series of letters they wrote to each other, under the guise of high-falutin' grand masters of a magical order, basically setting appointments to go drink and have sex with their illicit partners (Waite was having an affair with his wife's sister, who he'd fallen in love with before she got married to an old dude who had a lot of money). But interestingly I think it genuinely has some things to say about magic, relationships, mysticism, and maybe even the "alchemy" (fucking) that Regardie elliptically describes, based on Crowley's work, in Tree of Life.

Flying Witch 6 (Ishizuka)

More Flying Witch, more cute. You should read this. I think the show is actually better, but it's only 13 episodes, so if you want more, this is how you get more.

You Should Come With Me Now (Harrison)

Everything Harrison does slaps, but this recent collection of short stories is terrifying. They're very implicated in our world today, though I think the new Viriconium story about a horrible plague was written before our... horrible plague. If you like good fantasy and scifi, or good short fiction, get this book (some of the stories are less than a page long!). You will be constantly adrift among shards of other places.

The Monk (Lewis)

Look, I mean, you can see what I thought about this book over here, kinda lol.

Titus Groan (Peake)

If you've never heard of the Gormenghast trilogy, it's excellent. Peake was an artist, and his novels are delightful, full of grotesqueries and really startling cultural satires. The idea is that there's a castle, Gormenghast, in which life is totally devoted to rituals the meanings of which have been long forgotten. The earl steps out at a certain time, in a certain robe, to look at certain things, on certain days, because it's written he must do so.

The novels are Titus's life story, and he's just born and a baby through the entire first novel. Steerpike is also one of the most fascinating villains in literature, I'd say.

Peake died before he could finish the series, which he envisioned to be well over 10 novels from what I've read. The 3 we have are gifts.

Word Hoard (Videen)

Videen is the "Old English Wordhord" person on Twitter. Or, uh, unicode character U+1D54F. This is a fun book taking the reader through a variety of Old English words and the culture and history of England in the period. I studied OE some in school, but I'm by no means fluent in it (if we can consider anyone to be fluent in a language where we're missing so much of it). I still enjoyed it and learned a lot.

The Magical Plays of Florence Farr

Farr is, I'm convinced, one of the early Golden Dawn writers who actually knew what the fuck she was talking about. This is a collection of four plays she wrote that are either magically operant on their own or related to Egypt and other magical conceptions the Golden Dawn was messing about with.

(NOTE original text here was about a book of Farr's I read in July, not June. That's what I get for putting off these posts until they're this late. I've fixed the entry.)

She Likes to Cook and She Likes to Eat 1 (Yukazi)

This manga is... ok. I'll probably read the third volume before I decide if I stop. I like the main characters well enough, but the light touch on the second one -- who's a big, silent type, the "she likes to eat" of the title -- means after two volumes I know very little about her except that she's generically kind, somewhat soft-hearted, and rightfully has a complex about not getting fed enough.

Maybe you'll like it more! The basic concept is that a trendy young woman loves to cook, but eats so little, naturally, that she struggles to really cook what she wants to. It'll all spoil before she can eat it. She realizes her neighbor, a tall casual woman typically seen in sweats, eats a lot, and offers to share food with her one night. They slowly fall in love, and there's even a bit in volume 2 I did quite like where the first woman has to google being in love with women, because she simply never encountered the idea before. Very "I thought I didn't like relationships but actually I just didn't like men."

There are also some good cracks like, "why do they take what I do for me [cook] and turn it into something for men ["oh, you'll make such a good wife someday"].

She Likes to Cook and She Likes to Eat 2 (Yukazi)

As above.

Delicious in Dungeon 10 (Kui)

The gang finally reaches the center of the dungeon, and learn about the mad magician's backstory (or we do, at least). They clean his house which is hilarious, and make the largest curry ever. Things end on a cliffhanger.

Book of Tokens (Case)

Another book on tarot by the head of BOTA. This one isn't about learning to read the cards. They're prose-poems, basically, mystical meditations based on the cards and their accumulated astrological and kabbalistic images. It's good, actually. It even quietly acts like it's an older manuscript that Case is annotating, but because BOTA wants Case's name on everything, they spoil the fiction immediately.

Writings from Ancient Egypt (Wilkinson, trans)

Collection of translations of, well, writings from ancient Egypt. It spans the gamut from fiction to records of warfare, up to and including exhaustive lists of what the pharaoh took away with him when he looted enemy cities. It's a great look at Egyptian culture outside the usual context of religious rites and carvings in tombs (though some of those are in here too).

Tale of Sinuhe and Others (Parkinson trans)

I could copy and paste the above. This is from a different publisher, and a different translator, but in fact they share a ton of pieces in common. The above book has a few more things, but Tale of Sinuhe is considered a classic, a long-form piece describing a figure in the court who flees suddenly, for no conscious reason, when the old pharaoh dies and his son takes the throne. Wilkinson didn't translate Sinuhe because they regard Parkinson's translation as excellent. So just pick up one of these if you want to get either. Don't get both, like I did lol.