Monday, June 27, 2011

Originator

I was perusing my books at www.LuLu.com where and noticed that one of the reviewers, diongwi, 

where s/he stated the following for Pragmatic Magics:
                                        "I think it's a great book especially when starting out. 
                                         Yes, a lot of info he puts in there you can find
                                         elsewhere but definitely not in one place so easily."

The problem, of course, is that this information is found today practically everywhere but WHO & WHERE did you think it came from??? Pragmatic Magics was originally published in 1993 and back then you could not find this information anywhere. Hello??? But yeah today every half-assed website has liberally taken material from it, put it up & now they call it their own OR the dirty bastards join my Yahoo Groups, steal it without permission from me, & re-post it on their own groups or publish it in a book. Then they have the unmitigated gall to not cite me or my group yet the fuckers want me to buy a copy & give them a favorable review. Oy!

And s/he is incorrect about this being a great book for 'starting out'. Pragmatic Magics is actually an intermediate level book. Yes every piece of shit Occult book has ripped it off for what I've put in there & called it a 101 book but in truth 101 books are watered down far more than what Pragmatic Magics is. At least they should be. The best 101 book you'll find is The Basics of Metaphysical Empowerment and that was written in a watered down way so anyone could understand it.

This is like Enochian material - of which I am very limited in practical use - but at one time, there existed only the Golden Dawn, Crowley, LaVey & the Scheulers material on the subject. You couldn't get the original Dee manuscripts unless you paid an unholy sum to a used book seller for a poorly edited copy from the 80's by some short run British press. Then came the late 90's and someone got the bright idea to re-do the Dee manuscripts & put them out there & you had more than one person doing that & things evolved until you get what is available today.

At one time, there was a company called Acorn Press who did a shit job of publishing the grimoires but they did it. Such grimoires like the Grimoirium Verum were difficult to locate yet Acorn did it. When I joined the International Guild Of Sorcery (re: IGOS) it's goal was to locate Occult information & help folks obtain it for a fee. IGOS' directors got a bright idea of not only translating the French grimoires but also offering the original French edition as the latter half of the book so that the Occult scholar who could read French could evaluate the translation for him/her self.

We started doing that with all of our grimoies and the boys at one press caught on and copied that idea. Okay no biggie but we were the first to do that & on a mass scale. I know there are many old time Occultists who were grateful for the IGOS editions since they were high quality & inexpensive (originally most of them sold for $20 each in hard bound) which put them into a lot of eager hands.

With the Internet, it is easy to be a Johnny-Come-Lately & claim you've been doing X for Y amount of time but the truth is still there for anyone wanting to dig for it. Problem is few care about truth - they just pay lip service to it.