I’ve somehow managed to make more work for myself again tending someone else’s farm

Howdy everyone! Here’s a public summary of my activity this week ending August 4, 2023 and reminders about some things upcoming!

I posted a social media and Patron giveaway for this month with three chances to win a copy of the new edition of Tarot: Mirror of the Soul: A Handbook for the Thoth Tarot by Gerd Ziegler! More details below the fold, so check those out.

Behind the scenes, much to my chagrin after failing to generate meaningful following for yet another attempt at self-hosting a social layer for Hermetic Library last year, I’ve started to take the new library accounts at Threads and at Mastodon more seriously, and I guess I’m posting in those places regularly now? IDEK. It’s all up in the air right in social media land. Anyhow, what it boils down to is that I’ve somehow managed to make more work for myself again tending someone else’s farm, hoping I might manage to secretly pocket enough engagement for myself to eat. It’s exhausting, if I’m honest. But, it is what it is. I broke down and also added myself to the waitlist for Bluesky. Why there’s 5 big brand social media sites run by three rich white dudes, about whom there are various moral and ethical issues as people and as brands, that everyone is clinging to, I don’t know; and I wish it were different. At least there’s still scrappy Tumblr, run by Automattic (the people behind WordPress), and the truly decentralized ActivityPub, typified by Mastodon, with which most of the others may at some point interoperate, maybe?

And, you know, it’s astronomical Lughnasadh this week! I mean, unless you’re someone who uses a lunar calculation for those cross quarter days. I really should make note of that as some people do it on my Hermeneuticon pages for them, shouldn’t I? Hope you’ve been enjoying this period of time between the observed and astronomical dates for t in some way that leaves you with a good story to tell! For my part, it’s been a week of national weather warnings about extreme thunderstorms, areal flooding, and flash flooding here at World Headquarters. In fact, I woke up one morning this week to four whole alerts about those things.

Of course, this week I continued to work on the site and blog and so on, posted some memes, and various other things I’ll try to mention.

Thank you for visiting and being a guest of Hermetic Library. You help me be of service and make the work of the library meaningful. Especial thanks to each and every ongoing Patron on Patreon, Subscriber at Bandcamp, and Member on Ko-Fi for making the work of the library possible!

Tarot: Mirror of the Soul social media and Patron giveaway for August 2023

Courtesy of the publisher, Red Wheel / Weiser Books, I recently received at the Reading Room three copies of the brand new edition of Tarot: Mirror of the Soul: A Handbook for the Thoth Tarot by Gerd Ziegler, foreword Diane Champigny, part of the Weiser Classics series, which is just now available in all the places this month.

Head to the blog post for more info and links to the three places where you have a chance to win one!

Almanac

Here’s upcoming calendar and astronomical events, plus the daily Thelemic Tephilah practice, for the coming week, August 4–11.

Calendar

Follow Calendar on the web and rss. And, if you have a current or upcoming event to share, add it to the Hermetic Library Calendar!

Here’s recurring calendar events in Hermeneuticon for this coming week. Also, remember, I’m once again posting events from the Hermeneuticon calendar daily, along with Thoth card and Hexagram of the day and Thelemic Tephilah reminders, on the Hermetic Library profile in the ‘verse; so, consider following along there, adding it to your RSS reader, or soever.

• T Polyphilus lists a date for a Feast of Tahuti on August 6 on his Liturgical Calendar
• Ritual of Lughnasadh, Lammas, Astronomical, Sol in 15° Leo, circa August 7
• Greater Feast of Franz Hartmann, died August 7, 1912 at Kempten, Germany
• Edain McCoy, born August 11, 1957 at South Bend, Indiana

And, I didn’t post any upcoming calendar events to the blog this week.

Astronomical

• Moon enters Aries, August 5, 2023, 03:20 UTC
• Moon enters Taurus, August 7, 2023, 06:25 UTC
• Sun returns to 15° Leo, August 7, 2023, 18:23 UTC
• Moon enters Gemini, August 9, 2023, 13:05 UTC
• Moon enters Cancer, August 11, 2023, 22:52 UTC

Thelemic Tephilah

Here’s reminders for Thelemic Tephilah daily practice for this upcoming week, from the Hermeneuticon page for the month. Also, remember, I’m once again posting Thelemic Tephilah daily, along with Thoth card and Hexagram of the day and events from the Hermeneuticon calendar, on the Hermetic Library profile in the ‘verse; so, consider following along there, adding it to your RSS reader, or soever.

• Thelemic Tephilah, August 4, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 54-56
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 5, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 57-58
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 6, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 59-60
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 7, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 61
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 8, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 62-63
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 9, Fire, Liber LXV, Cap. IV, 64-65
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 10, (Silence)
• Thelemic Tephilah, August 11, Spirit, Liber LXV, Cap. V, 1-2

BAPhE METIS

Things to check out at Hermetic Library

• I added 5 more episodes the the Sitting Now archive, including the newest one and 4 more: Episode 77 – Horror and the Occult with Lon Milo Duquette, Episode 78 – Charles Manson: Myth and Reality with Nikolas Schreck, Episode 79 – Benighted Paths, Infernal Masques with Richard Gavin, Episode 80 – Aleister Crowley’s Strange Angel with George Pendle, and Episode 87 – Timeloops and Precognitive dreaming with Eric Wargo.
• I noticed that there are some transitional formatting issues with Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, so I fixed a couple, and put the rest on my to do list: Moonchild, A Chinese God, and How They Gathered the Silk for the Weaving of the Butterfly Net.
• I added an Hermeneuticon entry for Sabnock with images from this week’s generation experiment.

And on the blog

• Edging by John Griogair Bell for the Zine
• Daily drivers—A personal note about glasses
• Pirates of the Galilean—Um. Holy shit. This arrived in the mail this weekend.
• Tarot: Mirror of the Soul social media and Patron giveaway for August 2023—Three chances to win!
• Sabnock—Generated visuals for Sabnock from Goetia using Midjourney from a mix of parsed text description & seal image prompts.
• Anthology news, 2Aug2023—Here’s some stuff to check out!
• Season of Skulls—Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Season of Skulls by Charles Stross, book 12 or 13 (depending on who you ask? Amazon or Tor, respectively) of the Laundry Files series, and the third book in an internal trilogy starting with Dead Lies Dreaming and Quantum of Nightmares.
• “You love the sea, don’t you, Captain?” “Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where a man is never alone, for he can feel life quivering all about him. The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite, as one of your poets has said. And in fact, Professor, it contains the three kingdoms of nature — mineral, vegetable, and animal. This last is well represented by the four groups of zoophytes, by the three classes of articulata, by the five classes of mollusks, by three classes of vertebrates, mammals and reptiles, and those innumerable legions of fish, that infinite order of animals which includes more than thirteen thousand species, only one-tenth of which live in fresh water. The sea is a vast reservoir of nature. The world, so to speak, began with the sea, and who knows but that it will also end in the sea! There lies supreme tranquillity. The sea does not belong to tyrants.”—Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• But “to sell one’s soul to the devil”, to renounce no matter what for an equivalent in personal gain, is black magic. You are no longer a noble giver of your all, but a mean huckster.—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter VII The Formula Of The Holy Graal: Of ABRAHADABRA: and of certain other Words. Also: The Magical Memory.

Also, elsewhere

• Win a copy of the new edition of Tarot: Mirror of the Soul [Patreon/Any Patron]
• Win a copy of the new edition of Tarot: Mirror of the Soul [Mastodon/Public]
• Win a copy of the new edition of Tarot: Mirror of the Soul [Threads/Public]
• Anthology news, 3Aug2023 [Bandcamp/Followers]

The occult is political, q.e.d.