![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm far from sure how many people in the occult scene today have any idea just how scarce decent occult books were half a century ago. Yeah, I know, I sound like one of those geezers going on about how we had to walk two miles through the snow to get to school, and it was uphill both ways, blah blah blah -- and you kids get off my lawn! Seriously, though, between the stock market crash of 1929 and the first wave of serious occult reprints at the end of the 1970s, if you wanted anything that wasn't mass market schlock, you had to haunt used bookstores and write to hoodoo supply shops with names like Mar-Lar and Ty-Rad to get much of anything, and even then there wasn't much. This book was one of the exceptions. It's a very odd volume and it has an even odder history behind it, but for a while there it was the only source in English for the magical philosophy behind Martinism.
Martinism? Well, that's a story in itself. The short form is that a very strange man named Martinez de Pasqually showed up in the south of France in the 1750s with a remarkable system of magical and spiritual training that reads like medieval Gnosticism. He taught some of the most influential mystics and occultists of the time. One of them, Louis-Claude de St.-Martin, reworked the material he'd gotten from Pasqually, combined it with other traditions of mostly Christian mysticism, and passed on an initiation to his students. In 1891 Gerard Encausse, who wrote about magic under the pen name Papus, reorganized the tradition into an organization, the Martinist Order, which spread all over Europe over the years that followed. It was especially popular in Russia before the Revolution, which meant that a lot of Martinists died in Siberian prison camps once the Communists took over. (No, the Martinists weren't especially political; Communists just like to round up people who believe in anything other than Marx, and shoot or imprison them. It's one of their more reliable habits.)
Before things got ugly, Georgii Ossipovich Mebes was one of the major figures in Russian Martinism, and wrote a fine book, now available in English translation as The Encyclopedia of Occultism. Later on, a copy of this book -- then very rare -- came to a young Polish occultist named
Mieczysław Demetriusz Sudowski. After various adventures, which included a stay in India studying with the famous holy man Ramana Maharshi, Sudowski settled in Australia. Mebes' book was decades out of print and the rights were unavailable, since its author had died in a Soviet prison camp and there were no next of kin. So Sudowski, who'd taken the much less unpronounceable pen name Mouni Sadhu, translated Mebes' book into English and used it, with attribution, as the core material for a book of his own, The Tarot.
It's a bit of a mixed bag. Sadhu, as we might as well call him, had the attitudes you'd expect from a mystically inclined Roman Catholic occultist, and it shows -- the section in one chapter about the horrible fate of masturbators is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy. (I wrote about that in an earlier blog here.) Alongside such entertainments, however, is a great deal of very solid occult philosophy from Martinism and the continental European occult tradition generally. It had a very strong influence on me; if you want to know where I got my habit of resolving binaries into ternaries, for example, you're looking at the book right now. The Tarot is available these days in a sturdy hardback edition from Aeon Press, with artwork much less gawky than the ink drawings one of Sadhu's friends contributed to the original volume. Me, I still treasure my battered old copy, but that's because it has so many memories gathered around it, and those tend to be typeface- and layout-specific, at least for me. Now that Martinism and the French occult tradition generally is finding its feet here in the US, it's worth keeping in mind as a relatively easy, usually thoughtful, but occasionally hilarious intro to an unfamiliar branch of the occult sciences.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
It's nearly midnight and
I was delighted to receive, via yesterday's mail, my hardback author's copies of The Life Force Workbook, the last of the seven volumes in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence. This volume rounds out a project that I first sketched out in the mid-1990s, and originally tried to get started in 2001. t's been a long and rocky road since then, with plenty of delays and one bitter disappointment, which adds more than a little to the sense of satisfaction I feel now. Now that it's complete, I want to talk a little bit about what it is, why it's so important a project to me, and why it offers the decidedly quirky take on occultism that it does. 
When I first began studying occultism in the 1970s, the field embraced a giddy exuberance of subjects and themes. Magic and divination, which have come to be treated as the be-all and end-all of occult studies in more recent years, rubbed shoulders with the whole panoply of alternative perspectives: lost continents, ley lines, yoga, breathing exercises, fad diets, natural healing methods, radionics, pyramid power, and the list just keeps on going. Some of this was straight-up quackery, but there was a lot that wasn't; some of it was seriously useful, and a lot more was at least entertaining. 
The 1980s brought retrenchment in that as in so many fields. In place of the wild diversity of perspectives of the previous decade, a particular mode of pop-culture Neopaganism (the version promoted so efficiently by Margot Adler, Starhawk, et al.) seized the collective imagination, and became something of a mental monoculture in what was left of the alternative scene; very nearly the only alternative history that mattered any more, for example, was the one in which the Pope personally burned nine million witches at the stake in Salem. (I exaggerate for effect, but only a little.) Outside the Neopagan movement, ceremonial magic became a central interest; this had impressive upsides, notably the revival of the Golden Dawn tradition and the beginning of serious work on translating and republishing older occult texts, but it also involved a dramatic narrowing of options. 
It was during this period, in the mid-1990s, that I first started brooding over the idea of a system of occult training and self-initiation that embraced at least a few of the themes of the broader field of the 1970s. I was already moving toward the fringes of the scene -- I'd put in most of two decades on Golden Dawn ceremonial magic by then, but I'd moved from there to studying the teachings of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, a Druid Revival order that embodied some of the older vision, which got me plenty of hate from the Celtic Reconstructionist faction of the Neopagans. I started collecting some of the books that had influenced me earlier in my studies; and I started to explore the possibility that occult training could be done using bodies of lore that weren't restricted to magic, divination, and dancing around in a circle stark naked while chanting "We All Come From The Goddess" and hoping to get laid. ;-)
At the time I was also in the middle of my first serious studies of sacred geometry, and all that coalesced into a series of spiritual experiences where I saw a sequence of geometrical forms as the basis for a divination oracle and the foundation of a way of occult training. That became the basis of The Sacred Geometry Oracle, and it would have become the basis for a complete system along the lines of the current Golden Section Fellowship...except for one awkward little detail. The publisher I worked with in those days did editorial and marketing decisions via committee, and when The Sacred Geometry Oracle came before the committee, one of the members had just watched the movie The Matrix and came back burbling with enthusiasm, insisting that a deck that I'd intended to use as the basis for a sequence of books including earth mysteries and green spirituality ought to be done in an urban-noir style full of rusting metal, corroded concrete, and glow-in-the-dark neon. 
I objected to this. I was told, in so many words, to shut up and get with the program, that the publisher knew what they were doing and my concerns didn't matter. So an ugly, mangled version of my deck came out, and of course it flopped. I shelved the broader project and hoped that it might be possible some day to get back to it. By then I'd been suddenly landed with the job of taking a Druid order that was six inches from death on a slippery slope and getting it up on its feet again, and other concerns had to wait. If you want to know why my books on Druidry from that period all appeared from a different publisher, though, now you know. 
Time passed, the rights to The Sacred Geometry Oracle finally reverted to me, and after a few false starts I was able to place it with my current primary occult publisher, Aeon Books. It duly came out in a new and attractive edition, and found an audience. So I pulled out my old papers on the broader sequence, blew the dust off them, and went to work -- and here we are. 
It's nearly midnight and
I'm delighted to announce that the first wave of submissions for Technonomicon: A Book of Forbidden Technologies was even more substantial than I'd hoped. The contributions I've already received amount to just short of 30,000 words, or about a third of the way to the length I had in mind. I haven't yet written my contributions -- I had some other things to get out of the way first! -- so once those are in, we'll very likely be to the halfway point. 