Practical Solitary Magic
Melpomene posted on 2022-04-18 03:09 :
Overall a good starter book for ceremonial magick lite, so to speak.
Like many books of its era, it suffers from fear mongering passages and lots of opinions stated as facts ex Law of Rebound as objective fact, projection of contemporary human morality on deities, very specific ideas on spirit elementals, bashing the left hand path etc
Other problems include ill-advised practices, such as suggesting one bathe with malachite, malachite being a toxic mineral that dissolves in water, as well as dripping perfume into a stream as offerings to Ondines, which seems more like a great way to piss off water spirits for polluting their streams with synthetic chemicals.
It is a very very very Eurocentric and dated understanding of the world and magic ex Asia referred to as the Orient , but if you can look past all that I have read above, it serves as a decent start on a variety of subjects.
I personally enjoyed the dissection of the various planes and their functions towards magical working, and most of the anecdotes the author shares about her experiences. It is nice seeing a book getting down to the nitty gritty of the actual doing process of magick and the struggles one might find on their journey, as opposed to just copy pasting a bunch of spells, giving you brief reasons for their addition and then moving on.
Price: $250
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