The Brotherhood of Light and Darkness by Jason Augustus Newcomb, the 2007 hardcover from New Hermetics Press, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
“Alexander Sebastian is an armchair occult enthusiast who lack much direction in life, but his world is turned upside down when his police detective brother-in=law asks him to help identify some magical symbols scrawled at a gruesome, ritualistic homicide. The crime is so horrific that it almost seems the killer might be some sort of demonic creature.
Alex quickly becomes obsessed with the crime, wondering who could be practicing black magick right in his hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts. He decides to find out and is quickly drawn into the underground modern magick scene. He encounters a cast array of odd characters—an obese, narcissistic, drug peddling adept, a beautiful, coke-snorting, sex magick dominatrix, an insanely jealous Freemason who pontificates with a lisp, and many others. But is one of them a killer? Or is one of them a demonic conjurer?
To find out more, Alex joins the A∴R∴T∴, an international magical fraternity with a sinister reputation, discovering that the murder victim was a member of this group. He soon begins to have unusually vivid and peculiar dreams, and terrifying encounters with what appears to be the world of the supernatural. He can’t tell whether these experiences are magical attacks from the killer, or just the product of his overactive imagination. As he tried to separate fact from fiction, and find out who is responsible for murder, Alex also discovers the beginning of his personal spiritual journey into the world of magical awakening.
This story is drawn largely from Newcomb’s own personal experiences over the past twenty years actively participating in the modern magical community. It comes out of his real life encounters with secret magical fraternities and the unique, eccentric people that populate this sub-cultuer. Fans of Harry Potter or the DaVinci Code will discover what the world of magick and secret societies really looks like when you’re personally involved. It reveals the world of the unknown as it truly exists, with an insider’s view of the real world of Witches, Wizards, Rosicrucians and magical creatures.”
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