How can we engage with the literary tradition of Western Magic, knowing we need to be suspicious of its practical value for the experiences we seek to gain? In other word: How to read magical books with an explicitly goêtic lens?

It is upon us and us alone to find, define and walk our path through the body of creation. Take my word for it or prove me wrong. I am convinced that no actual personal daimon will ever choose a direction of travel on our behalf. They weave and we walk.

Evil only exists as an encounter. It is not an independent natural force, but describes the impact upon something. Evil is a relational quality. To speak of evil, thus, we have to speak of ourselves. Not necessarily as a psychological construct or sociological identity, but as a species, as a spirit, or a spark.

As the best knife was once passed from mother to daughter, I place this book’s pages in your hands. May you not cut yourself too deeply on them, and forgive them if they draw a little blood. Surely they are hungry, like the old Drude who crept around the barn at night before finding the bowl of milk and crust of bread you had wisely placed for her at the door.

Here you can read the exchange that took place between Gast Bouschet, Frater Acher and Harper Feist on the subject of the Black Dragon in Bouschet’s magical work. The text brings together three very different perspectives on a subject rarely addressed overtly and clearly in Western occulture. Each of the three voices has been honed and tuned by decades of practical and often painful work with the Black Dragon.

See, anything that is meant to happen to you over the coming 12 months will materialise one way or another. So now is our time to take charge, and to decide in which way exactly we want these changes to materialise for us. It is no longer a matter of whether but of how.

Drawing beauty from all encounters in creation is not a process of grasping, pulling or piercing a shell it hides underneath. Drawing beauty from all objects of creation is a process of lightly adjusting our ability to resonate, to empathise, to share a new experience. So to speak ‘you are beautiful’ is to say ‘I am in this experience with you, right now, in this very moment. The skin you are shedding, I have already shed or want to shed next.’

All beings are made to come out of weakness. Every newborn child begins life with a cry of terror. The first step on any great journey is always traumatic. As humans, we are made to rise from the broken. We are made to grow around wounds. Not just once, but again and again.

[…] What a mesmerizing, wonderful experience it has been. Both tantalizing as well as sobering at once. And that doesn’t even touch on the actual solitary practice that I’ve been privileged to do in various places: Seeing so many shrines in visions, having a deity lick flames off my hands, seeing the mother stone of Kali on a mountaintop, standing under the gaze of the Himalayans and listening to their songs, or being blessed by the icy waters of the springs at Muktinath.

So, what is La Scarzuola? A phantasmagoric dreamscape made of imagination turned to stone? A theatre of dreams in the middle of the Umbrian wilderness? The ideal city in miniature? Or the biography of Tomaso Buzzi himself, carved in stone? – All this at once, and then one of the best-kept treasures of European occult sights.

Here is a moment of pause for all the oral traditions of lived magic. Those invisible, vibrant lines from mouth to ear, through time and space, through generations and across continents.

We provide a new English translation of Agrippa’s 1527 chapter ‘Of Goêteia and Necromancy’ as well as our own reflections on Tenets of a Forbidden Craft.

What good is the knowledge of what holds the world together at its core if we continue to destroy it? More important than the knowledge of the innermost might be the knowledge of partaking.