Book Reviews
‘One: The Grimoire of the Golden Toad’ by Andrew Chumbley
Few modern grimoires have carved their place into contemporary witchcraft quite like One. First issued in 2000 in a mere seventy-seven copies, Andrew Chumbley’s talismanic working on the East Anglian Toad Bone Rite has long hovered between legend and scarcity. With Xoanon’s new clothbound edition (777 hand-numbered copies), this seminal text is once again within reach.
‘Lucifer: Princeps and Praxis’ by Peter Grey
[…] To those contemplating the purchase of these volumes I can say that they constitute a definitive contemporary articulation of the Luciferian tradition from both a theoretical and an operative perspective, and a defining work in the evolutionary unfolding of the Western esoteric tradition. As such they are modern classics.
‘The Faceless God’ by Thomas Vincente
[…] The key here is that the idiom of the Faceless God is precisely that: something which is not bound by literalism. That is, it is not enough to refer to the figure as mere metaphor but, as Vincente discusses, it appears to be a phenomenological experiential reality which the author traces throughout such manifestations as ram-headed Egyptian deity, Sabbatic Devil, Black Pharaoh, or Osirian cult as manifestation of the Hidden Sun.
‘Hekate Ochetos’ by Harper Feist
Harper Feist’s Hekate Ochetos is an exceptional and exemplary text. It’s a rare privilege to be invited inside a practitioner’s most private moments; those that are encountered during the conduct of a theurgical retreat involving consecutive rites of invocation to, in this case, the goddess Hekate.
‘The Hours’ by Mat Hadfield
As an active practitioner who has experimented with the techniques described in Hadfield’s The Hours, I can think of few better means of effectively supercharging one’s sorcerous endeavors than implementing this near-forgotten system of magical timing.
The Way of the Eight Winds, by Nigel Pennick
The Way of the Eight Winds is the culmination of several decades of thought, practice, and spiritual cartography by one of Britain’s foremost geomancers and cunning men. The book is both a manual and a memoir, a synthesis of traditional European nature-based spirituality, elemental cosmology, folk geomancy, and symbolic magic, grounded in Pennick’s personal experience with rural and urban mysticism.