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Our second announcement concerns The Rooted Flame itself: a book especially close to my heart, and one I have been writing since early 2024. Allow me to share something of how it came into being. In my day job – from which I will retire early next year – I work as an HR leader. Despite the unfortunate associations those two letters may evoke for some of you, the essence of this work is remarkably simple: we help communities take care of one another. We often fail, and only rarely succeed. Yet, much like the Great Work itself, that difficult ratio is precisely why we must continue rather than give up. If these things were easy, they would accomplish themselves. When The Rooted Flame first began to take shape in early 2024, I found myself at the convergence of my professional life and my broader experience of the world. Whether in private life or at work, it seemed that we had all begun to inhale so much crisis, tension, and uncertainty that there was no room left to exhale. Increasingly, I watched people’s horizons of hope cut short by the next household emergency or geopolitical upheaval; global anxieties fused with deeply personal ones into a single fireball held tightly behind the heart; while the chimera of rage, cynicism, egotism, and social withdrawal disguised itself as the only trustworthy paramedic left on the battlefield. So I challenged myself to write The Rooted Flame as a response. Indeed, as the most personal response I could offer: that we need not close our eyes to the difficult times surrounding us; that we can resist the temptation to drink from the hands of that chimera; and that, through our own goêtic practice, we may discover the strength, resilience, and – quite simply – the experience of being loved, so that we become advocates instead of assholes. What emerged is the book we now place into your hands this autumn: a goêtic grimoire for times of tyranny. A field guide for resistance in communion with your familiar spirits as well as your human comrades. As I write in the introduction: What you hold in your hands is not a dark book, but a book for dark times. As I invite you to immerse yourself in the terror and tyranny of the Holocaust, in a world that seems to have come unhinged, even to the co-existence with parasites within your own bodymind – none of this is intended to shock or numb you beyond the pain you already live in. Rather, this book is intended as a field guide for times of tyranny. It teaches us how to resist without rage, and to burn without despair, but with deep roots, calm hands, and an open heart.
As it turned out, this book became the culmination of many of my earlier works. It carries forward the heart-flame first kindled in Rosicrucian Magic and Holy Heretics. It continues the path begun in Holy Daimon, now stepping out into the open field of our familiar spirits. It is also a direct sequel to Ingenium: where that book prepares the inner self for spirit work, The Rooted Flame begins where those preparations are assumed to have been completed. Finally, it stands upon the broad shoulders of the entire Collectanea Goêtica, while aspiring to be my most technically explicit work yet on the practice of what I call goêteia. People have asked me who I write my books for, and I never have a good answer. I write, because the spirits and I stumble across stuff that we think needs expressing… From a human perspective, however, I wrote this book for all of us who are at risk of becoming strangers to ourselves – for those whose path, more often than not these days, may seem blocked, blinded or simply lost. I call it a field guide for times of tyranny because it neither glosses over the state of our world nor offers easy escape from either mundane or magical hardship. Quite the contrary. My hope is that it helps us ensure that, in our longing for safety, justice and change, we do not consume ourselves, but become rooted flames. LVX,
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