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ODIR Newsletter #7: October oddities

As summer is well and truly starting to give way to autumn, I reflect upon a strange coincidence. Already for years, autumn has been a time of spiritual reinvigoration for me, and a time of attunement to a more esoteric mode of being. This year, this has taken the form of delving into Enochian Magick, which already for a long time has held a strong fascination for me. As you will see below, this is heavily reflected in this issue’s reading suggestions.

Activity on ODIR has remained on a rather low level, with roughly one post per week. I will eventually pick up the pace a bit, but as always, I’d rather focus on quality than churning out tepid posts to keep up volumes. There’s a couple of interesting things in the works, so keep checking the site – or stay tuned for next month’s newsletter!

With autumnal greetings,
J.

Highlights from ODIR

Reading suggestions

  • If you ever wanted a college coursebook on magick, look no further: Chick & Sandra Tabatha Cicero’s Golden Dawn Magic is for you. Going through the basic concepts and ritual practices of the foundational Golden Dawn system in a clear, straightforward but somewhat dry fashion, complete with tables and clumsy clip art style illustrations, Golden Dawn Magic is definitely more a school textbook than an esoteric text in presentation. It’s also a very good beginner’s general presentation of western ritual/ceremonial magick – but perhaps not the best book to start with. It’s a bit too dry and matter-of-fact for that. A better point of entry might be Israel Regardie’s Ceremonial Magic, which we covered in last month’s newsletter.
  • In last month’s newsletter I also touched upon the topic – nay, the rabbit hole! – of Enochian Magick, which I dug deeper into this past month. Lon Milo DuQuette’s Enochian Vision Magick is a detailed introduction to the topic, somewhat hampered by the author’s somehow very American conversational, even banal style. But if you can look past that, Enochian Vision Magick is a great more or less practical guide to complement James Geoffrey’s The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee.
  • And what would an Enochian curriculum be without an Enochian dictionary! As far as I understand, Donald C. Laycock’s The Complete Enochian Dictionary is pretty much the standard work in this field. With both Enochian-English and English-Enochian translations, it’s an indispensable aid for anyone exploring the topic.
  • Switching to pulp-y horror fiction, The Living Dead is credited to horror legend and zombie pioneer George A. Romero as well as Daniel Kraus, but in reality the 800-page novel is Kraus’ work based on fragments and notes by the then-late Romero. It’s a novel with delusion of grandeur, which result in an arduous reading experience. The novel indulges too much in contextualization, presenting excessive life histories of even secondary characters, and never really manages to find its rhythm and pacing. In trying to describe some kind of “zombie metaphysics” it also reaches too high, resulting in some pretty clumsy theories as to the ultimate reason for the zombie apocalypse. However, goes without saying: even trace amounts of Romero’s pen make this an interesting read for zombie and horror buffs – just don’t expect a particularly good novel!

From our friends

  • Our friends over at Rihmastosignaali/The Mycelium Signal have resumed activities after a brief summer hiatus. There’s a couple of new episodes out, the newest of which is, at the time of writing, an interview with Tomi Antila (in Finnish): https://tuonenportti.fi/34-rajankavijat-vieraana-tomi-antila/

Miscellania

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