Tag Archives: New Age Mysticism

Entheogens and the Future of Religion

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Entheogens and the Future of Religion [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] ed Robert Forte, with Albert Hofmann, Terence McKenna, Ann and Alexander Shulgin, Thomas Riedlinger, Dale Pendell, and Rick Strassman, plus interviews with R Gordon Wasson and Jack Kornfield.

Forte Entheogens and the Future of Religion

Robert Forte assembled this diverse collection of materials largely from contributions made at a conference in Big Sur, California, on an unspecified date in the 1990s. The term “entheogen” is sometimes (justly, I believe) disparaged as a chemical or pharmacological term. But Forte — unlike some of the book’s other contributors — sets it up as a religious term, to designate the intended use of drugs, rather than their material composition or neurochemical behavior. Thus even alcohol could be enthoegenic under the proper circumstances.

This book includes contributions from some of the great luminaries of 20th-century psychedelic culture, listing among its more than a dozen authors Albert Hoffman (discoverer of LSD), R. Gordon Wasson (amateur ethnomycologist and pioneer in the psychopharmaceutical theory of religion), and Terence McKenna (noted psychedelic adventurer and shamanic lecturer). Hoffman’s essay on “The Message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for Today’s World” actually seemed to me to be the most forward-looking of the pieces in the volume, despite its ancient topic. 

There are papers discussing the use of psychedelic sacraments using various perspectival frameworks, including ancient paganism, pentacostal Chrstianity, Buddhism, shamanism, academic inquiry, scientific research, and legal ethics. There is even a long poem treating the genesis of LSD under the figure of the ancient mysteries. But there is surprisingly little tangible planning or call to action, despite the editor’s presidency of the Church of the Awakening (never described in the book) and the issuance of the text under the aegis of the Council on Spiritual Practices. 

Although the authors of the later chapters on the academic, scientific, and legal contexts all bemoan the senselessness of the current drug prohibition regime, they offer no instruction on how readers might mobilize to change it. And while some of the contributors express hopes regarding the enfranchisement of new religious traditions that respect and use entheogens, none venture so far as to say what these might look like or who might be most likely to form them. So, again, in spite of the title, I came away from the book with some useful information about the recent past, and a certain validation of my own biases, but no new ideas about the future.

Decoding the Enochian Secrets

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Decoding the Enochian Secrets: God’s Most Holy Book to Mankind as Received by Dr. John Dee from Angelic Messengers [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by John DeSalvo.

DeSalvo Decoding Enochian Secrets

The highlight of this relatively recent (2011) volume on angelic magic is the first complete publication of the last remaining element of John Dee’s Enochian corpus as delivered to him by spirits through the mediumship of Edward Kelley, i.e. Liber Logaeth, a.k.a. the “Book of Enoch.” Author John DeSalvo provides that text in the form of scanned facsimiles from the British Library. This Appendix B is more than half of the book.

Decoding the Enochian Secrets starts with a couple of chapters regarding the biblical person of Enoch and the ancient (“apocryphal”) Book of Enoch, with some inquiry into their connections with the Dee and Kelley materials. While I was intrigued by the idea that DeSalvo might come up with something new on this front, as he certainly gives it more sustained attention than most authors on the topic, he’s not able to muster anything beyond broad thematic similarities between ancient and early modern “Enochian” lore. He also supplies a high-level summary of the Dee and Kelley evocations, repeatedly quoting passages from the diaries that describe Kelley being struck and lit by radiant beams from the stone.

DeSalvo’s commendable attention to primary materials does result in an editorial clarification of the forty-nine tables of Liber Logaeth, including the “missing” forty-ninth. He emphasizes that Dee’s diaries identify the express purpose of the Calls to be assisting with the understanding of how to operate these tables, also that the angels enjoined Dee not to do that work until receiving further commands–which were never delivered.

Nevertheless, the recommendations here for contemporary practice are surprisingly conventional, and very much in the mode of Crowley and Regardie (the only 20th-century magicians DeSalvo mentions). His method for “meditation” on the aethyrs prescribes the lesser pentagram ritual for opening and closing, and includes goetic-style prayer and “license to depart” both marked as “optional.”

I agree with DeSalvo’s view that original versions of these tables were probably all inscribed by Dee while the entranced Kelley was dictating them. (All but one of the surviving tables are in Kelley’s hand, evidently copied from Dee’s.) He makes the credible and intriguing suggestion that these originals might survive, perhaps even in the British Library, subject to misattribution or faulty cataloging.

DeSalvo speculates that Liber Logaeth was received by Dee, but embargoed by the angels because it is intended to serve as a device of the “end times.” He suggests that his work in issuing this book is part of that instrumentality, even connecting it with “2012 being the end date of the Mayan calendar” (73). On this front, he willfully ignores the chiliastic dimension of Crowley’s The Vision & the Voice, and seems to mistake the immanentization of the eschaton for its “imminentization.”

This book tries to straddle the gap between a popular introduction to Enochian magic and a more specialized defense of DeSalvo’s own theories and excavation of sources. I would only recommend it for the latter, since there are other and better options for the former.

The Sun At Night

Bkwyrm reviews The Sun At Night [Amazon, Bookshop] by Roger Williamson in the Bkwyrm’s Occult Book Reviews archive.

Williamson The Sun at Night

Neat book. I tend to be very critical of occult fiction, since most of it is rewarmed crap. This work is definitely original. It does tend to remind the reader at times of Dion Fortune’s The Sea Priestess, but in a good way. This is an “occult morality tale”, about a young man, magickal orders, self-deception, love, and books. It’s not long, about 100 pages, and is the perfect length to read on a train or plane trip. Highly recommended.

Tantra for Westerners

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Tantra for Westerners: A Practical Guide to the Way of Action [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library] by Francis King; newer edition Tantra: The Way of Action. A Practical Guide to Its Teachings and Techniques. [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library].

King Tantra for Westerners

King Tantra The Way of Action

Francis King’s treatment of Tantric practice in this volume is more attentive to authentic source materials and ethnography than most Neo-Tantric literature of the last few decades has been. Even so, he seeks to universalize it beyond its original south Asian context. His emphasis on what defines Tantra as such is not so much “sex” (as the typical Neo-tantrist would have it) as it is a dualist metaphysic and transgressive method.

Tantra is compared to ritual magic of the Golden Dawn school throughout the book. In particular, there is a claim that the tattwa materials that circulated in the GD were rooted in the Bengali Tantric text Nature’s Finer Forces published in English by the Theosophical Society. King carefully examines the correlations between the sat chakras and the qabalistic Tree of Life made by Aleister Crowley, J.F.C. Fuller, and Dion Fortune, rendering his own verdict and recommending related practices. He also weighs in on whether Crowley should be viewed–in King’s terms–as “an authentic, if unorthodox, tantric” (76), ultimately answering in the affirmative and citing (without details) various secret instructions of O.T.O. to support the point.

In this book, King has an awful lot of opinions for someone who does not make any direct admission to being an actual practitioner. Most of them sound quite sensible, but it’s reasonable to wonder about the nature of King’s authority when encountering his authoritative tone. His historical speculations on the relationship between the Tantras of different religious traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain) fall within what I understand to be the range of current scholarly views on the topic.

A set of appendices cover such diverse issues and items as psychedelic drug use in “Western tantra” (King’s basically against it), a revision of the invocation of the “Bornless One” for goddess devotions, and a comparison of Taoist “internal alchemy” to parallel Tantric practices.