My publisher told me that when I wasn’t there, Hilal played an imaginary violin, as if she were practicing. I know that chess players do the same, playing entire games in their head, without the need of a board. “Yes, she’s playing silent music for invisible beings. Perhaps they need it.”
Paulo Coelho, Aleph [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Although sometimes,” I go on, “we need to be strangers to ourselves. Then the hidden light in our souls will illuminate what we need to see.”
Paulo Coelho, Aleph [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Haiti was the only place in the world with a widespread belief in zombies. And what the dead need when they return to the world of the living is sea water. In all mythology there is some kernel of truth, otherwise it would not survive. So therefore…
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
I’m a master now, an idea transcended into life. And so this is my new path, which is a lot like the old one, but mine. To stay on that path, I need to work harder, explore new rituals, evolve. Am I evil? Am I good? I’m done asking those questions. I don’t have the answers.
Daniel Cerone, Dexter [Amazon, Showtime], s02e12, “The British Invasion”
I curse the engineer who thought this was a problem in need of a solution.
Hugh Howey, Glitch: A Short Story
Remember the first rule of magick: if it works, use it; if it doesn’t, drop it. There’s no need to complicate your practice with a distracting level of concentration. There aren’t any shoulds in sex magick, just choices.
Brandy Williams, Ecstatic Ritual: Practical Sex Magick
The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry, translated with commentary by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) and Nasrollah Pourjavady, the 1999 paperback new edition from Omega Publications, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
“a few fragments from the introduction
Sufism can be seen to have functioned as a positive and healthy reaction to the overly rational activity of the philosophers and theologians. For the Sufis, the road to spiritual knowledge could never be confined to the process of purely intellectual activity, without the direct, immediate experience of the Heart.
In this book we are concerned with one art that the Sufis made peculiarly their own: poetry. Why should Sufis in general, and Persian Sufis in particular, choose to write poetry?
When they wanted to ‘be themselves’, lovers of the Truth, they needed a language more intense, closer to the center of human awareness than prose. Truth is beautiful, so when one speaks of it, one speaks beautifully. As the lover sings to his beloved, so did the Sufis to theirs. Love itself creates a taste for this language, so that even the prose writers of Sufism scatter verse throughout their works and create poetic prose.
The overwhelming theme of this poetry is the Love relationship between the individual, the lover, and his Beloved, God. What characterizes the Beloved is beauty, loveliness, His self-sufficiency or needlessness.
‘You must take these poems as mirrors; for you know that a mirror has no form of itself, but rather reflects the face of anyone who looks in it.‘ Ayn al-Qozat Hamadani”
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.
