A Magical Library
(This page is a rough draft and will gradually evolve.)
Starting Points
I want to start by pointing out a few writers whose work I have found super useful to me as a beginner. (If I get too distracted to ever finish the rest of this guide, these works will guide you well a long ways into magical territory.)
Again, I plan to add sections (pages?) on Tarot and Astrology, but these are huge subjects, so for now I'm focused on other part of magic: primarily meditation, ritual, everyday practice.
These are more or less in the order I encountered them on my path.
Andy Puddicomb
When I had been lifting weights for several years (after decades of struggling to get myself to go to the gym regularly), I started to wonder "What else might be possible? What other practice might I be able to do now?" I had always struggled to meditate regularly. I wandered into a book store and found this book. I found it an easy read and its instructions effective.
Soon I noticed that the author had created an iOS app with guided meditations and other instructions:
is probably the most widely used meditation app. A lot of my friends seem to look down on meditation apps, but... this worked for me. I tried to meditate regularly for decades and failed. So I'm not going to get all elitist and pull the rope ladder up after me. The instructions are good, they are accessible to people with a wide variety of backgrounds. The tone is playful, but the content is serious and well-grounded in traditional practice.
When I started using this app it was just a year long linear course that you worked through one day at a time. It's since... evolved. Into kind of a multimedia wonderland/juggernaut. Which is maybe a shame? It's very engaging, but I think a new practitioner might need to be a bit intentional about how/whether they want to use all the bells and whistles, daily content feed, etc. The underlying solid instruction is still there though.
I don't use Headspace for meditation anymore -- I eventually kind of grew out of it and prefer sitting in silence. But I still subscribe because there is a big catalog of something they call "Sleepcasts" which are essentially long boring stories that help you get to sleep. They're read by expert voice talent and have variant sections that get randomly swapped in and out, making them work well for repeated use. Interesting enough to hold my attention, but boring enough that I don't mind drowsing off.
A drawback of Headspace is that it is quite expensive: about $70/year with an introductory price of $42/year as of this writing. It has actually come down a lot from when I started. I found (and find) it to be worth it, but your mileage may vary.
Durgadas Allon Duriel
The Little Work: Magic to Transform Your Everyday Life
This is the first book I bought when I reengaged in magical practice about a year and a half ago in 2022. It was an excellent (re-)introduction
Duriel seems to come from a Neo-Pagan Witch and Western Ceremonial Magic background but he's also a social worker with a good grasp of stuff like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
The Little Work refers to an idea from Hermeticism, "The Great Work", a magical operation which aims to attain a sort of enlightenment or union with God.
The Hermetic perspective seems to regard this as the Actual Purpose of Magic. ("High Magic", as opposed to applied, practical magic, perhaps.)
The Great Work is a Big Long-Term Project and can be... uhh... destabilizing for aspirants lacking a solid foundation in what we tend to think of as "the real world". Things can get weird.
In The Little Work, Duriel provides a program to help establish this foundation.
He introduces basics of magical practice in a pragmatic, no-bullshit way, eschewing the self-impressed obscurantism regrettably common in occult writing, then applies these practices to the real work of self-improvement.
(occulting for adulting?)
The Little Work program is structured around the classic Western elements (Air, Fire, Water, Earth). It's about managing your mental state, developing willpower and follow-through, emotional self-regulation, health of the body, home, sustainable livelihood & career.
Magical practices such as rituals to establish a sacred space or develop consciousness of the subtle body are presented alongside more "mundane" techniques from Cognitive Behavior Therapy, SMART goal setting, budgeting. This feels quite natural and common-sense.
I'd recommend "The Little Work" as a starting point for beginners interested in exploring or developing a magical practice, or occult-curious people trying to get their shit together in a fun, interesting way.
It's common for technical writing to assume the reader is already familiar with the basics of the field. What I love about this book is that it doesn't skip the fundamentals.
This kind of entry-level writing is hard to do well, and Duriel does it well.
Even occultists with established practices are sure to find something interesting or new here. I found the program to mirror elements of my own practice, but cast a different light on them. Other things were new to me (and exciting!)
This book is good. If you're curious about magic, I highly recommend it.
Tasshin Fogleman
Is a nice, accessible introduction to the Jhanas, which are altered states of consciousness reachable through meditation. They're quite pleasant and support magical work and insight practice in profound ways.
Tasshin Fogelman has done a lot of great, approachable writing about meditation and conducts fascinating interviews -- he was kind of the Terry Gross of a certain corner of spirituality Twitter during the early to (what I'm hoping is the) mid-pandemic.
Leigh Brasington
Brasington has written a lot about the Jhanas.
He has published an index of his work on the subject.
Brasington's book on the Jhanas. It's quite good and practical. Half of it is a how-to guide to the Jhanas for practitioners who have become able to sit for about a half hour and have decent focus and are ready to start exploring these states. The other appears to be heavily researched scriptural justification for the importance of the Jhanas in modern practice. Jhanas seem to have fallen out of favor with large numbers of Buddhists at different points in history, one apparently being contemporary Western Buddhists. I don't really know? But it's interesting?
Rob Burbea
Rob Burbea is, I guess, effectively my current meditation teacher. I have listened to literally hundreds of hours of his talks and he has deeply informed and enriched my practice. I would study with him in person, but he died of cancer in 2020, before I learned about him.
Tasshin Fogelman, has written an excellent introduction to and appreciation of Burbea's work.
The Hermes Amara Foundation was established in 2019 at Rob's request to preserve and distribute his work. They have built a database of his recorded talks (with links to audio and text transcripts).
Here are the series I've listened to and highly recommend. (I'll type up little descriptions of these soon.)
- The Loving Kindness (Metta) Retreat (audio) (text)
- Practicing the Jhanas (audio)(text)
- Meditation on Emptiness (audio) (text)
- Path of the Imaginal (audio)(text)
- The Mirrored Gates (audio)(text)
- The Theatre of Selves(audio 1 2 3)(text 1 2 3)
- Eros Unfettered (audio) (text)
If you're coming to this material from a basic mindfulness practice (like you might learn from an app like Headspace) I'd recommend the talks in this order, starting with Metta. Each layer of this path informs and supports later work.
Tech Note: I listen to these on my phone, typically while running. iOS's music app is... not great for long talks, so I download the files to my desktop and then airdrop them to my phone and listen to them with an app called BookPlayer, which is great. Sorry, I don't know what's good for Android -- please share if you do?
I am also working through his book on Emptiness Practice, Seeing That Frees, which is great, but slow reading for me. (I badly miss the alternate universe where his book on Imaginal Practice exists. Yeah, and where I get to practice with him in person.)
Sadalsvvd
The Bridge from Here to Everywhere
This webpage by my friend Sadalsvvd inspired me to write this document that you are reading.
It's a narrative and map of his journey from an ordinarymaterialist, non-magical world deep into magic.
Around Here We Take Our Phenomenology Seriously
A philosophical basis for exploration.
A Reluctant Guide to Making Friends with Spirits
This essay was catalytic for me in establishing contact with spirits, an experience largely alien to me when I re-engaged in magical practice. It's an excellent introduction to this aspect of magic, with concrete suggestions of things to try.
Aidan Wachter
Six Ways : An outline of Wachter’s magical world view & practice, approaches and entry points to spirit-based magic. A great introduction for beginners who want to start actually doing magic.
Weaving Fate : A detailed description of three workings with fate and time. The Black Book: a fictional journal written by a future you as a magical hypersigil. The Corridor: journeying into your past to change it. The Fever Stone: Extracting and metabolizing trauma from your past and ancestors.
Changeling : A set of essays on witchcraft focused on qualities of the witch, with related things to think/write about, rituals, exercises. Also an expansion of the practices outlined in Six Ways.
Patrick Dunn
Magic, Power, Language, Symbol A Magician's Exploration of Linguistics 2008
This book is about language and symbol -- how they work and how they can act as an underlying structure for magic. Dunn's metaphysics are that language and symbol are the underlying reality of the World and that magic works by interacting with this ecology of meaning. This view is very similar to my own metaphysics, but he comes at it from a different direction, so I found his perspective provides a richly informative parallax on this ontology.
Dunn offers all sorts of interesting ways to magically play with language. I found his suggestions about glossolalia especially challenging and productive!
If you are at all interested in the connections between language and magic or enjoy a symbol-based metaphysics, you might like this book. A lot.
The Practical Art of Divine Magic Contemporary & Ancient Techniques of Theurgy 2015
This book was recommended to me by my friend & mentor Hawk. It's about theurgy, magic done to commune with gods, to hang out with them and build relationships with them. Dunn is a practicing polytheist and a classics scholar, so he writes from personal experience and from knowing something about how ancient people interacted with gods. He is focused mostly on ancient Greek practices. He describes how ancient Greeks interacted with gods (as far as we can tell -- many practices were secret) and how he communicates with his gods today. He provides exercises you can try to experience and develop relationships as well.
Dunn is self-conscious and post-modern about his practice and recommends a similar approach -- not to try to authentically re-construct ancient practice (which wouldn't really work without the surrounding cultural context), but to invent something new informed by historical polytheism. (Ironically, this turns out to me more authentic anyway, since what people did and have always done is reinvent current practice informed by past practice.)
I found this book super helpful in catalyzing my relationship with several gods I felt drawn to, but wasn't really sure how to engage with. I was surprised to find that he recommends several practices I was sort of already doing intuitively (e.g. making offerings of food, light, incense, attention), which was really validating. I'd recommend this book for anyone wanting to engage with gods, but unsure of how to start. It's quite practical and approachable.