My Hands Were Clean

My Hands Were Clean by Tom Bradley, a 2010 paperback from Unlikely Stories, bound together with Dr. Gonzo by Deb Hoag, is part of the collection at the Reading Room courtesy of the publisher.

Tom Bradley My Hands Were Clean from Unlikely Stories

“My Hands Were Clean tells Tom Bradley’s teenaged story of working as a musician for pseudo-Mormon polygamists who conducted Aleister Crowley-style sex magick rituals under their place of business. It features cover art by Justin Aerni”

 

Deb Hoag Dr Gonzo from Unlikely Stories

“Dr. Gonzo: A series of loosely related essays on equality, visibility, and modern mental health, or, How the Mental Health System Drove Me Crazy details Dr. Hoag’s efforts to provide effective psychotherapy in a nation of apathetic lawmakers and actively hostile insurance companies. Check out the cover art by Gabriel Vrooman”

 

The Hermetic Library Reading Room is an imaginary and speculative future reification of the library in the physical world, a place to experience a cabinet of curiosities offering a confabulation of curation, context and community that engages, archives and encourages a living Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to contribute to the Hermetic Library Reading Room, consider supporting the library or contact the librarian.

Consider also:

  1. “For it is impossible to-day, as it was impossible in ancient times, for a man to reach the heights of moral perfection and spiritual consciousness which were then, and are now, the goal and aim of all the schools of the Mysteries and all the secret orders, without purification and trial. Complete stainlessness of body, utter purity of mind, are absolute essentials to the attainment of things of great and final moment.”
  2. De secretis naturae seu de quinta essentia
  3. The Dialogic Imagination
  4. Portable Darkness
  5. “the feeling of wanting to look out a window with someone and have them get it”