BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Sexual Magick & Other Essays (1988) Katon Shual   The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism (2008) Arthur Versluis   A Brief History of Nakedness (2010) Philip Carr-Gomm   If you are looking for some 'how to' manual involving dark side practices, Shual's Sexual Magick is not the book for you. Rather it is a sensitive and humane investigation of the role of the sexual in modern magical practice and it is thoroughly liberal in tone. Katon Shual is the pseudonym of the Oxford-based magician, Mogg Morgan, who has done much in such circles to bring the somewhat harsh and masculinised world of Crowley and Grant into line with modern liberal and tolerant culture. The high point for me was an extended 'rant', allegedly from the God Set, against not Christianity (the usual target of neo-pagan resentment) but late paganism as it developed under the Roman elite. For a simple account of how neo-pagans see sexuality in quasi-political and cultural terms, pag...

The Magical Revival (1972) Kenneth Grant   The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages (2002) Brian Bates   Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009) Owen Davies   The Book Of English Magic (2009) Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate    Aleister Crowley and the Aeon of Horus (2009) Paul Weston   There is no book quite like Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival . But what exactly is it? In some ways it is a conventional narrative of the 'new' Magical experiment that was introduced by the 'revelation' of Aiwass to Aleister Crowley in 1904. Grant takes us through to the Zos Kia Cultus of Austin Osman Spare who died in 1956. But this general narrative is overshadowed by the book's true purpose which is to do for Magic as a religious narrative what the Early Church Fathers did for Christianity - to express both its cogency and its mystery and so its high and serious purpose as a spiritual tradition, if not necessarily a religion in the formal se...