I recommend both books wholeheartedly. They are among the most thought-provoking, poetic, and absorbing works I have had the pleasure of reading in recent years. And should you wish to read them side by side,  I can promise you a reading experience of rare richness.

Freemasonry in the Haitian Imaginary is an inspired and inspiring work. Its emphasis on the re-assertion of a people’s essential dignity and agency – that “enlightenment from below” arising from an esoterically-imbued ritual practice and its potential spillover into wider society – is surely one that is sorely needed in this day and age.

Ritual & Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mithras sits naturally alongside Adams’ earlier work as the masculine counterpart to Mystai […]. Together, the two books represent a sustained and serious attempt to recover the experiential core of ancient mystery practice, not as historical reconstruction for its own sake, but as a contribution to understanding the deeper roots of Western esoteric tradition.

[…] So that to experience them in their fullness, re-stored and re-furbished and stripped of historical accretions, is to immerse oneself in a holistic and systematic path of spiritual development with little if no unnecessary baggage. In other words, a literal pilgrimage. I cannot recommend Black Pilgrimage too highly; it is a defining and definitive text of modern esoteric thought and practice. 

[…] 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.

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.

[…] This then, is where the Black Cube shines most darkly; for all that Moros presents us with scholarly analysis, and historic and new rites to encounter the Saturnine Deity in our own lives should we wish closer congress, it is his obvious intimate embrace of, and his deep suffusion in such a Saturnine Gnosis which wells up. 

For Klages, the mystery of the enthusiasm is magically potent ­­– as potent as the Mysteries of the pagan cults. […] In Of Cosmogonic Eros we are presented with a subterranean labyrinth of language which may return us to Soul at its centre – if we have the courage to engage.