Tag Archives: guilty pleasure

The High Couch of Silistra

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews High Couch of Silistra by Janet E Morris, with a mass market paperback cover by Boris Vallejo.

Janet E Morris Boris Vallejo High Couch of Silistra

This sword-and-planet yarn was the author’s first novel, and given that its entire sub-genre tends to fall (at its best) into the “guilty pleasure” category, I think it’s all right. I certainly liked it better than the Dray Prescott book (Warrior of Scorpio) which was my last reading in that field.

The sexual content is more explicit than Burroughs or Akers would deliver, and about comparable with Norman, although without the Gorean sadistic moralizing. In any case, it doesn’t really rise to the level of erotica despite the protagonist’s status as her homeworld’s most celebrated courtesan-madame-sexual athelete.

The metaphysical positioning of the book seems to break with the Burroughs-Norman tradition of fraudulent cults fronting for alien gods. The main plot of Returning Creation—evidently the author’s title, restored in a later edition—is the quest undertaken by a semi-divine woman (the “creation” in question) to find her alien father on his homeworld. Most in her society are skeptical about the “seed-sower” legendary that identifies the god race to which her father seems to belong, but her experiences eventually vindicate the lore, and the story ends inconclusively with her accession to her heritage among her father’s super-powerful people. Seeing that I have the sequels already in my possession, I expect to indulge my curiosity about where the author might take the narrative from that point. [via]

 

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.

The Secret History of the World

The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth, from Overlook Press, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World

At times derisory and ridiculous, at times cloyingly panderingly truthy, but, as Booth asks the reader in the introduction to approach this text “as an imaginative exercise,” this is a pretty much an amusing guilty pleasure summer read. At least it isn’t as abysmal as LIFE The Hidden World of Secret Societies, right? This made the New York Times Bestseller list, so as a sort of widely exposed, soft introduction for the novice, this might, maybe, be a book that could spark some conversations, and lead the reader to more serious material. This is from the same publisher behind The Book of English Magic, which I reviewed a while ago, and it occurs to me the latter could follow the former in a series for the YA or non-academic reader interested in such things.

“They say that history is written by the victors. But what if history—or what we come to know as history—has been written by the wrong people? What if everything we’ve been told is only part of the story?

In this groundbreaking and now famous work, Mark Booth embarks on an enthralling tour of our world’s secret histories. Starting from a dangerous premise—that everything we’ve known about our world’s past is corrupted, and that the stories put forward by the various cults and mystery schools throughout history are true-Booth produces nothing short of an alternate history of the past 3,000 years.

From Greek and Egyptian mythology to Jewish folklore, from Christian cults to Freemasons, from Charlemagne to Don Quixote, from George Washington to Hitler—Booth shows that history needs a revolutionary rethink, and he has 3,000 years of hidden wisdom to back it up.”

 

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.