STARS AND STONES

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An Astro-Magical Lapidary
Peter Stockinger

Stars And Stones
An Astro-Magical Lapidary
Peter Stockinger
Format: Softcover/164 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-906958-73-2
£14.99/US$24

New revised edition

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Triple Peter Stockinger UK

Triple Peter Stockinger USA & Elsewhere

Unlock the hidden powers of crystals and gemstones.

For millennia, magicians and astrologers, familiar with celestial magic, knew that precious stones held an important key for the maintenance of health and wellbeing. During the Age of Reason this knowledge was lost. Now, nearly 400 years later drawing from ancient sources, Peter Stockinger’s astro-magical lapidary invites you to re-discover this long-lost knowledge and to learn how to utilise the magical and therapeutic powers of gems.

· Read the in-depth descriptions of 30 gemstones and crystals revealing their hidden lore, and discover their practical use from antiquity;

· Study real-life cases that demonstrate how to use the beneficial powers of crystals and gemstones;

· Learn how to find your perfect gem, create gemstone talismans and manufacture lucky fixed star rings.

The lapidary also contains a thorough introduction to the subject of traditional astrology, a therapeutic index and a detailed glossary.

A Contemporary Western Book Of The Dead

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An Anthology
Edited by Charlotte Rodgers & Lydia Maskell

A Contemporary Western Book of The Dead
An Anthology
Edited by Charlotte Rodgers & Lydia Maskell
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-906958-04-6
£15.00 +P&P / US$22+P&P


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‘I was musing on Singapore in all its affluent glory still having shrines for the dead on every street corner during ‘The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts’. Then I was musing on how the socially mobile of modern western society eschew death rites and grieving in the name of ‘holding it together’ and being progressive. I thought of which civilizations are falling and which are rising again, and wondered whether acknowledging death and the ancestors is a vital part of a maintaining personal identity and our place in society. I remember how my grieving father mourned for all the information he had relied on his deceased wife remembering; information which was now lost. I recalled Michael Crichton’s words ‘If you don’t know (your family’s) history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.’

Then I thought maybe someone should write about the cults of the ancestors and death, perhaps an anthology, perhaps cross relate experiences of loss to personal spirituality and magick and history. I know that years of working with the dead in the name of art and spirituality, didn’t prepare me for the death of my mother. What helped me was the advice of someone from a long tradition of working with the ancestors. I think that collecting the experiences of spiritual practitioners in their working with grief and death is part of a living and necessary tradition that will give respect to the dead and strength, identity and support to our own personal spirituality.’

Within this book are rituals, stories, traditions and experiences of magicians’ scholars and artists who work with death. Some of the contributors such as Nema, Mogg Morgan, Louis Martine and Nevill Drury (to name but a few) have helped define contemporary transformative spirituality. Others are less well known but just as learned. As there should be in such a collection there is comedy, anger confrontation and practicality. This anthology is about who we are, and where we come from. It is also about how we change. A Contemporary Western Book of the Dead contains voices and visions that acknowledge our past, feed our present and guide the direction of our future.

Introduction/Charlotte Rodgers
Loved One/Nema
All a Do about Death /Josephine McCarthy
Clans For The Memory / Sarah Grimstone
Learning About Death / Nevill Drury
A Thoughtful Wake / Louis Martinie
Break On Through To The Other Side /Louise Hodgson
Death the Final Frontier / Sue Fox
The Bardo Thodol – Bon Voyage / John Power
You Only Live Twice / Ode bi Tola
On Speaking with the Dead: The Cult of the Dead in Traditional Culture / Michael Clarke
Body / Mishlen Linden
The Great Western Hoax / Ode bi Tola
The Book of Gates: A prose arrangement / Mogg Morgan
Biographies of Contributors

Photographers:
Sue Fox, Ruth Kenyon, Ariadne Spyridonos Xenou (Cover: Gerald Hutton)

The Octavo

A Sorcerer-Scientist’s Grimoire
Peter J. Carroll

The Octavo
A Sorcerer-Scientist’s Grimoire
Peter J. Carroll
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 9781906958176
£15.00 / US$24.00
Subjects: Chaos Magick

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Every universe potentially has its own Supreme Grimoire containing the spells which define its reality and the magic which you can perform within that reality. In this Octavo we have assembled scattered secrets for a Supreme Grimoire for Roundworld, the universe in which you’re standing.

To this end we have taken some inspiration from Pratchett’s Discworld, and a lot from Theoretical Physics and Practical Chaos Magic.

The most original, and probably the most important, writer on Magick since Aleister Crowley.”
–  Robert Anton Wilson. Author of the Cosmic Trigger trilogy.

Review of The Octavo by Dave Lee
This is the second book Pete Carroll has brought out in the last two years, after a number of years’ silence. In 2008, there was ‘The Apophenion’, which was something of a departure towards an overall philosophical position, which we might call chaoism, as distinct from chaos magic. Now he presents us with a new synthesis that aims at a much closer marriage of scientific theory and magic than he, or, to my knowledge, anyone else, has attempted.

The first thing you’ll notice about this book (other than the excellent illustrations) is the subtitle. The reference will be lost on non-Pratchett experts like me; I’ve enjoyed a few of Pratchett’s books and found others a bit twee for my taste. (I have to admit, though, that he shows superb understanding of the thermodynamics of godhood in ‘Small Gods’, and a brilliant vision of the Other in ‘Lords and Ladies.’) Apparently, there’s an Octavo of Discworld spells, and it seems this volume is using the conceit that it’s the Roundworld equivalent in order to show how physics and magic can be combined in two very different universes.

The second thing you’ll notice is the physics. Publishers say that every equation in a book halves the readership, and there are a lot of them in The Octavo*. More, in fact, than in Liber Kaos, but they – at least the ones in the first few chapters – are of a very different kind.

The ‘Equations of Magic’ in Liber Kaos have always been problematic: they dealt in quantities which are not measurable, and probably never will be, like ‘degree of gnosis’ and ‘magical link’. So, they are not really equations, but things that look like equations; what they amount to, at best, is a mental checklist, a summary of what we know about magic so far. With a shorthand like that, all that matters is that it’s easily memorable, and the physico-mathematical symbolism does not help at all.

The equations in Octavo are very different. They are much more ambitious, genuinely cosmogonic in nature, and I suspect they have some very important things to say – to those who understand them rather more deeply than I do. I did get lost for much of chapters 2 and 3 (I only have maths to just short of A-level), but surfaced again at the start of Ch 4, where he compares Discworld and Roundworld physics, and comes out with some pretty profound stuff.

One of the things that’s particularly interesting about Carroll’s science is the way he attributes real physical – or aetheric / shadow-physical – reality to quantities that appear in the fundamental equations of physics. In Liber Kaos for instance the wavefunction in the Schroedinger equation is a measure of a real quantity in shadow-time, rather than a mere mathematical convenience, to be discarded as soon as possible in the course of calculations. No, Carroll finds a home for these misty, despised quantities, integrating them into a description of a magical universe. In The Octavo, he comments about quantum superposition, which is a concept we’re normally just supposed to get our heads round, that it actually has fine detail which makes it much more physically real – the alternative forms of the particle are kind of parked in sideways-time. For me, that is a distinct improvement on the usual way superposition is described.

This realistic use of mathematical entities recalls Galen Strawson’s ‘real materialism’**, as does this (p97):

‘A visualized or imagined event can have a similar effect on the imaginary time plane as the probability function of a material event, because it too constitutes a wave-particle event’.

In other words, ‘thoughts are as real as rocks’, to the real, Strawsonian materialist. Carroll also gives a physico-mathematical reality to Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields – they are the information contained in the virtual radiations emitted by everything all the time.

I do like the depiction of particles as closed universes (p23), and it’s satisfying to read Theories of Everything, but the problem for the mathematically sub-literate becomes: how can I distinguish the true ones? I’m not sure that Carroll’s doing away with the Big Bang (a dirty job, but someone had to do it) yields a truly more complete ToE than the current one: a steady state model of the universe comes no closer to explaining where everything comes from than the expanding-from-a-point one does, it simply makes it an unaskable question, which is not the same thing. His cosmological explanation of the red shift (the core mystery of cosmology) involves something like a new mechanism for Zwicky’s previously-rejected ‘tired light’ hypothesis, and I have asked a mathematical friend of mine how viable an explanation it is.

Some of my reservations about this book stem from Carroll’s over-willingness to form Laws. Right near the beginning of the book, he has concreted the ‘multiple selves’ model into one. The idea of selfhood as multiple arose out of a very postmodern milieu of thought about what we are, and has proved very useful to magicians. However, it does suffer from a vagueness at its core: it would be a good idea to clarify the difference between personalities and the moment-to-moment sense of selfhood. The former may be usefully thought of as multiple, but the sense of self is always and ever phenomenologically singular. I challenge anyone to describe how it can be sensed otherwise.

This excessive taste for laws surfaces again on p66, where Carroll attempts to prove that there is always ‘ an even number of selves’, with an argument I found so unconvincing I suspect the author is self-consciously preaching to the choir, knowing we’ll indulge him.

My main criticism of the book is that the ‘Equations of Magic’ reappear in Ch6. I’ve said above why they are not equations, but simply tally-sticks; they remind me of Frazer’s useless laws of magic, but with added algebra to put more people off. Has a magician ever told you they’ve helped him or her plan a working?

Their inclusion wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it wasn’t for the very high quality of arguments pursued using real equations in the cosmological parts of the book: to someone who hasn’t been following the maths very closely but can see how the EoMs cannot be real equations, they simply serve to cheapen the value of the other equations and arouse suspicion about their validity. And to use them to derive, via a complicated chain of reasoning, the conclusion that group magic is no more powerful than individual magic is pure tautology, because the only way anyone could get that conclusion would be by building it into the ‘Equation’ in question.

By the way, can we have a straw poll on this? My feeling is that group magic is immensely more effective for some kinds of enchantment.

The final complaint I have is a purely aesthetic one. Sure, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to replace the phrase ‘material base’ with something else, because we do talk about servitors quite a lot. But the term ‘groundsleve’, to my ear, is down in the flooded and odious basement of English, along with ‘staycation’ and ‘bromance’. (OK, I suppose that means I’ll have to come up with one myself.)

Back to a few final words of praise: One of the satisfying things about this book is the way Carroll fills out and brings up to date old ideas, some of which he has developed and used years before. Like the way the good old GPR gets completed into the GCR, a much more symbolically satisfying and complete thing.

Proper weight is given to the Apocalypse, and what wizards can do to help avert the collapse our stupidity has got us into.

I have to make a special mention of the llustrations. If there was an award for ‘best occult book graphics of the year’, then Matt Kaybrin’s would sweep it, with these bold, dark, unusual mixtures of traditional and cyber-art.

In the end, I would definitely recommend this book. It is important, maybe very important, and will stir some interesting thoughts even in the non-mathematically-inclined. Carroll’s basic attitude to mysteries is the only healthy one: not to try and banish them, like the Dawkinsian parascience bunch, or use them to obfuscate, like the religious do. He writes: ‘Mysteries should present challenges, not opportunities for dumb belief.’

*I showed the book to a mentally tough shaman I know, and as soon as he saw the equations, he declared he’d rather chew his leg off than try to understand them.

The Octavo is remarkable in the finest sense of the word: a great and indeed unique achievement, making a genuine physics of magic’.
– Professor Ronald Hutton

GREAT PURPLE HOO-HA

part I&II
Philip H. Farber
(Magical Fiction)

The Great Purple Hoo-Ha part I
Philip H. Farber
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-906958-16-9
£9.99/US$14.99
Subjects: Fiction/Magick/NLP.

‘Farber’s writing is a joyride through the psyche. Absurdity and the internal workings of our own beliefs are less than a hair’s width apart – and Farber illustrates this with inimitable style, humor, and a kitschy sense of self- referential pseudo-realism.’
– LaSara Firefox Allen, MPNLP,
Developer of Gratitude Games and author of Sexy Witch


Special Offer:

GPHH Part 1&2 for Only £12.99+p&p

GPHH Part 1&2 for Only $22.00+p&p


‘As blatant propaganda, The Great Purple Hoo-Ha is funnier than Catholicism and slightly less disgusting than ads for colonic irrigation.’
— Ivan Stang,
Church of the Subgenius

‘A surreal, submodalicious page turner that will have you leaping from the written words to your own life in a joyous celebration and an aching wish for your own Hoo-Ha.’
— Donald Michael Kraig,
author of Modern Magick and The Resurrection Murders.

”From a magicko-religious point of view I’d say, ‘The Great Purple Hoo-Ha proves that changing Perception is the Great Work’. From a reader’s perspective I’d say, ‘It’s like Stranger in a Strange Land except much funnier and with hotter sex.’ From a friend’s perspective I’d say, ‘Dude, you should buy this!'”
— Don Webb, author of Aleister Crowley: The Fire and the Force and Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path.


‘Joe had a drinking problem. The possible demise of his television talk show and the end of his career had tilted a very big bottle of Old Mystery into his guts.

Now he was having trouble telling where the hallucinations ended and reality began. Had the mysterious young man with the cat – whom nobody else could see – really granted him a magical wish for fame and fortune?

Were the sex-obsessed cultists he was investigating on the show really bringing on the End of the World? Where did the sentient cream-filled pastries come from? Who was the Most Disgusting Rock Star Ever?

And, more importantly, would Joe ever get his new girlfriend, the Goddess, into bed?’