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. 

6 comments:

  1. Excellent post brother, and I remember IGOS' books and owned a handful of them. In comparison with Joe Peterson's and Skinner & Rankine's definitive editions they may not be the top of the line today, but back then in the mid 90's they were the only game in town and I was damned happy they were there.

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  2. Thanks M.C. Yes IGOS grimoires were the ONLY thing available in the 90's that one could find reasonably priced if one was simply looking for a good, decent translation to experiment with. Robert Blanchard did the translations (I know because I was sent his original, typed manuscripts) and he did a fine job.

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  3. Part of this is due to the idiotic idea that writing a book is something that every magician is supposed to do. So instead of a few specialty books written by experts in their field, we have a shit-ton of the same introductory garbage rehashed a thousand times over, usually by people who haven't even bothered to work though it themselves.

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  4. I haven't seen your books yet, but from your short descriptions at Lulu they look fantastic. I'll give them a go as I'm always looking for means of bettering my practice.

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  5. I remember IGOS editions fondly, and yes, they were the only game in town at the time. It is a little silly to lambast the hard work put in by those Sorcercerers just because perhaps newer and better editions are available.

    One of my teachers, John Reynolds, had re-translated and published many important sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to correct the Evanz Wentz version. When I was poking fun at the Evanz Wentz version, he strongly corrected me, saying "look there were errors, but it was groundbreaking when it came out and all of us owe a debt to it".

    I feel much the same about IGOS.

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  6. I also owned some Igos editions in the late 90's I moved across country and had to leave my be loved library behind ,I've spent the last 10 years trying to replace it.

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