VERY HIGH STRANGENESS

Rev. Alyson Dunlop Shanes. Mystic Visions: Spontaneous Supernatural Visions, Flying Disk Press, 2024.

There is no denying that Rev. Shanes has had a very active life filled with experiences and encounters with angels, demons, aliens and the paranormal. She grew up in a family that had supernatural experiences; at age four she started doing yoga exercises and at fourteen she communicated with a guardian spirit she called Norman using a Ouija board. At about the same time she was given a copy of The Exorcist by her grandfather who probably did not realise it was not age appropriate.

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SEX, SATANISM AND EATING ONIONS

Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti. Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland. Inner Traditions, 2022.

This enjoyable read has in my view been given the wrong title. I would suggest 'Riotous Assembly' for what follows is just that: a smorgasbord of short biographies mostly from the twentieth century of some of Finland's most notorious characters involved in one form or another in the occult. 

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THE PRINCIPLE OF THE MIND

Charles Stein, The Light of Hermes Trismegistus: New Translations of Seven Essential Hermetic Texts. Inner Traditions, 2022.

As a fan of the Hermetica – those extraordinary cosmological, philosophical and magical works attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, which had an immense but shamefully ignored impact on Western culture – it’s always good to see a new work on the subject. 

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MAGIC AND THE MURDER QUEENS

Jem Bloomfield. Witchcraft and Paganism in Midcentury Women’s Detective Fiction. Cambridge Elements, Magic. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

At last! Finally, the rarefied world of academe has deigned to turn its august attention to magic, as in this series of Cambridge Elements short books. The full scope and ambition of this series is summed up on the back cover of this contribution: ‘Elements in Magic aims to restore the study of magic, broadly defined, to a central place within culture.

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ON HIS MAJESTY'S VERY SECRET SERVICE

Francis Young. Magic in Merlin's Realm. A History of Occult Politics in Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Journalists often use the language of magic to describe political events. They refer to the "Dark Arts” of politics, political advisors are described in semi-occult terms as 'Svangalis' or 'Rasputins', who “drip poison” into the ears of our political leaders. In this book Dr Francis Young shows how the idea of magical involvement in the political life of Britain has a long history and has played a major role in the political life of the country.

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CULTURAL LEADERS

Carl Abrahamsson, Occulture: The Unseen Forces that Drive Culture Forward, Park Street Press, 2018

Although coined back in the 1980s, in the last decade ‘occulture’ has emerged as something of a buzzword in the art world and among cultural commentators in academia. As Carl Abrahamsson – a self-proclaimed ‘cultural entrepreneur’ and founder and editor of the ‘annual occultural journal’ The Fenris Wolf - notes, it has almost entered the mainstream.
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SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE

Jack Neave. The Surrender of Silence: The Memoirs of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians. Edited by Colin Stanley. Strange Attractor Press, 2018.

'Ironfoot Jack' earned his nickname from the metal frame that supported one leg, which through some accident, was several inches shorter than the other. 

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CULTURAL OCCULTISM

Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford. The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947. Routledge, 2018.

This is a collection of scholarly essays examining ways in which occult ideas spread into a wider popular culture in Britain, from the late Victorian period, roughly contemporary with the development of Spiritualism, until the end of the Second World War and the rise of Wicca and modern Paganism.

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TOWN AND COUNTRY

Merlin Coverley. Occult London. Oldcastle Books, 2017 (2nd Ed.)

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Justin Hopper. The Old Weird Albion. Penned in the Margins, 2017

These are two quite different books, but linked by one theme, the magic, legend and memory of place. Coverley’s book is ostensibly a straightforward guide-book to London, pointing out locations associated with various figures and ideas associated with the history of occultism and magic, from John Dee’s Mortlake (and I’ll have something to say about that later) to Highgate and territories beyond Zone 6. 

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ART AND THE OCCULT: COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Nadia Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy and the Birth of an Artistic Movement. Mandrake of Oxford. 2nd rev. edition, 2016.

John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult. Palgrave MacMillan. 2015.

Although similarly titled and published near-simultaneously, these books aren’t two of a series (although Bramble’s is part of one on modernism). While there’s some common ground – Choucha’s study being of a subset of the wider subject covered by Bramble – they are very different in style and approach (and approachability).

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TOO MUCH INFORMATION?

Tobias Churton. Occult Paris, The Lost Magic of the Belle Epoch. Inner Traditions, 2016.

I came to this book as someone unfamiliar with the subject matter, and I was therefore encouraged by the rave reviews on the flyleaf, one of which described the book as “the best introduction to the French occult revival ever written”.
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THE NAZI OCCULT - FACTS AND MYTHS

Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (editors). Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies. Camden House, NY. 2015.

There have been dozens of books examining the purported links between occultism and the rise of Nazism in Germany, ranging from the scholarly to the most abjectly crass and sensationalist. 
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CROWLEY FOR BEGINNERS

John S. Moore (text) and John Patrick Higgins (illustrations). Crowley - A Beginner’s Guide. Mandrake of Oxford, 2015.

Aleister Crowley is one of the most notorious occultists of modern times. His name is known by many, even outside esoteric circles and those whose interests touch upon such matters. When compared to his contemporaries, Crowley’s name is probably the most familiar to laypeople.
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MAGICK, MUSIC AND ROCK AND ROLL

Peter Berbergal. Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll. Tarcher, 2014.

Music, it has been said, is the only art that engages our entire brain. Whether this is true or not, it can certainly reach into us and touch emotions in a way that other art forms may miss. It is something that can surprise us by reaching into our memories in an abrupt and unexpected fashion to resurrect past times and moods.
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LETTING IN THE LIGHT

P.T. Mistlberger. The Inner Light: Self-Realization via the Western Esoteric Tradition, Axis Mundi Books, 2014.

My immediate reaction on being handed The Inner Light to review was that this was a book that could go in one of two very different directions. The title and subtitle, together with the packaging and the cover blurb’s description of the author as a ‘transpersonal therapist’ and ‘transformation workshop facilitator,’ awakened all my prejudices against the New Age.
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OCCULT INTERNATIONAL

Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic (editors). Occultism in a Global Perspective. Acumen Publishing, 2013.

Plenty has been written about occultism in modern Britain and America, but less about it in other parts of the world. Here is a collection of essays, mostly by professors of religious studies, looking at particular countries, including Italy, Turkey, and Colombia. There is also the phenomenon of ‘esoteric Hitlerism’, the promoters of which were generally not German.

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SEEING THE LIGHT

Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment, Yale University Press, 2013.

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John V. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013

Since the 1970s there has been a gradual, if grudging, acknowledgement by academic historians that occult ideas and beliefs played a much more influential role in the Renaissance than previous generations would admit. Now, the same seems to be happening for the era to which the Renaissance gave way, the Enlightenment or Age of Reason.
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THE TEMPTATION OF POLITICS

Marco Pasi (Translated by Ariel Godwin). Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Acumen Publishing, 2014.

Books about Crowley have proliferated in recent years, so that it is quite a while since I was able to count them on my fingers. The reason, I think, is that the two biggest problems faced by a would-be biographer are, firstly, that little may actually known about the subject’s life, as with Shakespeare; or, like Lewis Carroll, the life is well-documented but rather dull.

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THE COOLEST MAN EVER?

Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, 2013.  Review by Clive Prince

The extraordinary seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher is one of the most fascinating and intriguing figures in history. The vast scope of his interests and learning has earned him the sobriquets of ‘the last Renaissance man’ and ‘the last man who knew everything’ – even, according to the title of a conference organised in 2002 by the New York Institute of the Humanities to marked the four-hundredth year of his birth, ‘the Coolest Guy Ever’.
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DEVILISH DOINGS

Robert Ziegler. Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siècle France. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

On the first page of the first chapter the author informs us that “In Britain, renowned occultist Alfred Waite characterized France as fertile ground for the spread of black magic . . .” Arthur Waite was indeed one of the leading occult authors of the time, but this does not encourage us. Later, he refers to “the Hindu goddess Shiva”.
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