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TWPT: When
was it that you first realized that there was more to
this life than what met the eye? Specifically, when
did you begin to suspect that magic was not all smoke
and mirrors like you saw on the stage but instead a
layer beneath the visible?
JMG: As far back as I can remember,
I had a sense that the world couldn't possibly be as
two-dimensional as parents and teachers insisted it
was. As a child, I was fascinated by just about anything
out of the ordinary, from Ripley's Believe It Or Not
on up. Fantasy fiction made up a lot of my reading --
I discovered Tolkien's Ring trilogy at the age of ten,
and the wizard Gandalf became my childhood role model.
Yes, I was the kind of kid who signed junior high school
yearbooks in Elvish.
I have a condition called Asperger's syndrome, which
is related to autism but doesn't mess up your language
abilities. Kids with Asperger's have a lot of trouble
learning social skills, and usually become loners with
some sort of obsessive interest to make up for the lack
of social contact. That was me, and my obsession was
anything weird. Growing up in middle-class suburbia
in the 1960s, though, I didn't encounter magic as a
practice, something I could actually _do_, until one
day in 1976...
TWPT:
When was it that you formally began studying magic
and why was it that you moved from spectator to participant?
What was it that you decided to pursue first in
your magical studies and how did you come to the decision
to start where you did?
JMG: It happened on a bleak December
day in Seattle in 1976. My mother had taken my sister
and me along on a shopping trip downtown, and we were
on the eighth floor of the old Frederick & Nelson
department store, long since gone out of business. While
my mother shopped, my sister and I wandered over to
the book section to kill time. I browsed through the
science fiction and fantasy section, then found the
"weird stuff" section, which in those days
was full of books on pyramid power, and the Bermuda
triangle.
There was something else, though, top row of the
rack, just left of center. The title was _Techniques
of High Magic_, and the authors were Francis King and
Stephen Skinner. The cover art showed a young man in
stylized robes raising his arms in a gesture of power,
with sword, cup, wand, and pentacle hovering about him.
The back-cover blurb spoke of magic as "the yoga
of the west" and promised access to a universe
of spirits and powers through self-initiation into a
tradition of high magic.
I literally stood there shaking, feeling as though
someone had just handed me the Holy Grail. I wanted
that book, I think, more desperately than I've ever
wanted anything else. I knew, right down to my core,
that I wanted to be a magician, to practice magic, to
devote my life to magic. Reality intruded; I didn't
have the money to pay for the book. I made myself put
it back on the rack.
A little while later my mother came bustling back
from wherever she'd been shopping. Something had apparently
put her in a good mood, and out of nowhere she told
my sister and me that we could each have a book if we
wanted one. She _never_ did that. I made a beeline back
to the rack, retrieved the Holy Grail, and tried to
be as nonchalant as possible while she gave it an incurious
look and took it and my sister's book to the nearest
cash register.
I read the book cover to cover as soon as I got home,
and went from there. It was basically a manual of simplified
Golden Dawn ritual magic, and so that's the system I
started with. It was years later that I finally sorted
out the different magical traditions and realized that
the Golden Dawn's approach was one system among many.
For those first years it was magic, my magic, and that
was all that mattered.
TWPT:
Did you have any written resources at your disposal
as you began this journey? Do you remember some of the
basic texts that you started with?
JMG: Books were my best friends
already, and they turned into my teachers and initiators
as I started magical training. Aside from _Techniques
of High Magic_, a book that became central to my magical
practice early on was W.E. Butler's _The Magician: His
Training and Work_, which I'd still recommend to anyone
interested in magical training. A little later on, when
I'd begun to develop an interest in the wider context
of magical practice, Richard M. Bucke's _Cosmic Consciousness_
and Theodore Roszak's _Where the Wasteland Ends_ provided
important guidance; neither one's explicitly about magic,
but the first explores the psychology of spiritual transformation
and the second relates spirituality to nature. Finally,
in my early twenties, I made Israel Regardie's immense
tome _The Golden Dawn_ my central focus, and spent a
dozen years working my way through it, cover to cover.
It's not a book I'd recommend to a beginner, but once
you know what you're doing, it's still one of the best
things in print for systematic magical training.
TWPT:
Were there any organizations or individuals that
gave you some guidance during your initial forays along
this new path?
JMG: I was strictly a solitary
practitioner until well after I turned thirty. A good
deal of that was the Asperger's syndrome, which made
dealing with other people a challenge -- much more so
when I was younger. At this point I belong to several
magical organizations, and have studied in recent years
from some very inspiring people, but that's a fairly
recent development.
TWPT:
Do you consider magic and spirituality separate
paths or do they converge at some point?
JMG: For me the point of magic
is that it's a way of spirituality and a set of tools
for the work of spiritual self-transformation. It doesn't
have to be pursued that way, of course -- you can limit
yourself to practical magic, and never use it for self-transformation
at all. My own interests are primarily in the mystical
dimensions of magic, though, and so it's not a matter
of the two converging at some point; my magic is my
spirituality, and has been since I took up the magical
path.
TWPT:
Have you always wanted to write? How did
you go about developing your writing skills?
JMG: I wrote my first book at
age seven. I have no recollection of what it was about
-- something short, and illustrated with my not very
good seven-year-old drawings. By the time I was eleven
I wanted to be a fantasy novelist, and pursued that
dream for nearly twenty years, through rejection slip
after rejection slip. I must have finished and submitted
a dozen novels, none of which went anywhere. I finally
turned to magical nonfiction in the early 1990s, and
was able to get into print almost instantly.
As far as developing writing skills goes, the best
advice I was ever given came from George Scithers, former
editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. George
commented that everybody has a million or so words of
bad writing in them, and the only way to get them out
is to write them down. Once you've written them out,
you can get to the good writing that's also inside you.
The same advice also works for magical practice, by
the way.
Of course there are shortcuts. Strunk & White's
_Elements of Style_ should be required reading for would-be
authors -- it's amazing how many people don't realize
that the best concept in the world won't get you anywhere
if your manuscript is written in sloppy, garbled English.
Learning another language is surprisingly useful --
I think it was Goethe who said that if you only know
one language, you actually don't know any at all. The
experience of putting the same thought into two different
languages gives insights into structure, rhythm, tone,
and connotations that you can't get any other way.
TWPT:
Tell me about Geomancy and sacred geometry in
their very simplest forms, and what was it that attracted
you to them.
JMG: Geomancy is a system of
divination, very popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
but mostly forgotten these days, using sixteen figures
made of single or double points; people with computer
backgrounds can think of them as four-digit binary numbers.
It's part of the Golden Dawn system and had a chapter
in _Techniques of High Magic_, so inevitably I studied
and practiced it. Later on, doing research in medieval
magical writings, I found out that there were whole
dimensions of geomantic divination that nobody remembered
any more. Done the traditional way, it's as complex
and subtle as the I Ching, and gives clear, straightforward,
extremely detailed answers to practical questions. My
book _Earth Divination, Earth Magic_ was a first pass
through these older methods; one of these days I plan
on doing something more extensive on the same subject.
Sacred geometry is another subject that used to be
required study for magicians and is mostly forgotten
these days. Magicians use pentagrams, for example, because
the geometrical relationships that form a pentagram
have certain predictable magical effects. There are
many other geometrical figures with powers of their
own. That's become a major interest of mine, since there
has been very little work done on the subject in the
last three hundred years.
TWPT:
You are a certified Tarot Master, tell me how
it is that one gets to use that title and how Tarot
fits in with your magical studies.
Actually I'm a certified Tarot grandmaster.
Those titles are issued by the national certification
board, which in the US is the Tarot Certification Board
of America (TCBA); their website is at www.tarotcertification.org
. There's a process you go through to get certified,
and there are many levels of certification; the grandmaster
level is for those who have made significant contributions
to Tarot study and practice.
Tarot is one of the fundamentals of the Golden Dawn
tradition, as a basic alphabet of symbols that can be
used in many different ways. It's not simply a method
of divination! The Tarot is the Swiss army knife of
the magician; you can do almost anything with it, from
meditation and visionary experience through ritual magic
to self-initiation, and more. I'm currently working
with a magical order that plans on expanding its work
with a publicly available correspondence course; the
course will cover every area of magical practice, including
some things that nobody's done for hundreds of years,
and the Tarot will be the tool of choice every step
of the way.
TWPT:
Tell me about the first book that you had published
and what it was like to see your thoughts given
a form that others could share.
JMG: My first published book
was _Paths of Wisdom_, my book on the magical Cabala,
which came out in 1996. The material was originally
written for a correspondence course on Cabalistic magic
which I taught for several years in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Teaching the material via correspondence
was quite a learning experience; there's nothing like
questions from a bunch of enthusiastic students to show
a teacher how much he doesn't know yet! It required
a lot of work on my part, though, and I ended up deciding
to transform the course into a book.
I'd spent most of my life up to that time working
on my writing skills and learning how to get ideas down
onto paper, so writing the course and then the book
was straightforward enough. The whole time I was asking
myself, "What would I have wanted to see in a book
on the magical Cabala back in the days when I was first
starting out?" To judge from the reviews, that
worked fairly well -- a lot of people found _Paths of
Wisdom_ very useful as a training manual.
Of course it was a rush when _Paths of Wisdom_ first
came out. Sales were steady, but modest enough that
the original publisher decided not to keep it in print;
I'm talking to another publisher right now about a new
edition. I understand copies of the original edition
go for fairly high prices on the used book market, when
you can get them at all.
TWPT:
In your book Circles of Power you are taking a
look at ritual magic in the western tradition. Give
me an idea of what the "western tradition"
is and how it differs from other magical traditions.
JMG: That was the publisher's
choice of labels; I'd asked for "ritual magic in
the Golden Dawn tradition" but didn't get it. I
wonder how many readers know that authors have no say
in the title and cover under which their books are published.
Dion Fortune and some authors of her school used the
phrase "Western mystery tradition" to distinguish
their post-Golden Dawn magic from Theosophy, and that's
more or less where talk of a "western tradition"
came from.
_Circles of Power_ was my first serious effort at
a handbook of ritual magic in the Golden Dawn system.
What set it apart from nearly everythign else in the
field was that it didn't just copy the original Golden
Dawn tools and techniques -- it expanded on them, dropped
some things that didn't work too well and replaced them
with other things. There was some bellowing in the stricter
end of the Golden Dawn community when it first came
out. Too many people in the occult scene these days
are obsessed with authenticity, even when it gets in
the way of effectiveness. The magicians of the past
would have laughed themselves silly at that attitude;
for them, the important thing was what worked.
TWPT:
Has it been easy or hard for you to share some
of the complex ideas of ritual magic in written form?
JMG: Ritual magic translates
into written language very easily. There's a good reason
for that: for many centuries, it's primarily been passed
on in written form. All through the Middle Ages, for
example, ritual magic was written up in grimoires --
literally "grammars" of magical practice --
and students would basically be handed one and told
to follow the instructions. All the major magical orders
of the last century and a half taught via written lessons.
As a result, the techniques and tools central to modern
ritual magic are precisely those that translate well
into print.
TWPT:
Who are your books aimed at? Those who thoroughly
understand magic or those who are just beginning to
explore ritual magic?
JMG: All my books are aimed at
the beginning-to-intermediate market. Expert magicians
need very few books. The further you go in magic, the
more you develop your own personal style and approach
to the magical arts, and the more you learn from experience
rather than from books.
TWPT:
If someone had just decided that ceremonial magic
or ritual magic was something that they wanted to pursue
seriously how would you advise them to begin?
JMG: I'd tell them to choose
one book on basic magical practice, select a set of
practices, and do those every day for a year. Magic
is like music; you learn it by working at it, and daily
practice is the one absolute non-negotiable requirement.
Very few people would try to become musicians by reading
a bunch of books on music, getting together eight times
a year to play one tune with a group of friends, and
never touching their instruments at any other time.
It's embarrassing how many people seem to think the
same level of work qualifies them as magicians.
One year of daily practice is what one of my magical
teachers used to call a "flake filter" --
it screens out people who want to pursue magic as a
fashion statement rather than an actual practice. It
actually doesn't matter what practices you choose. The
important thing is that you do the same practice each
and every day, seven days a week, for a year. Sometime
in the first week, usually, the glitter wears off and
you learn that magic is hard work. Sometime in the first
month or so you realize that magic will actually change
you, and change the way you relate to the world. Sometime
after that, it sinks in that magic is real -- that it's
not just make-believe and dress-up games, something
to shock your parents and make people think you're way
out there, but a real power that can hurt you if you
mess with it incompetently. A lot of people hit one
or another of those realizations and run like rabbits.
Those who don't run, who keep on with the practice despite
the fear, become magicians.
TWPT:
In another of your books entitled Inside a Magical
Lodge you give folks an insiders view of what a magical
lodge is and how it operates, did you have any goals
in mind when you decided to write this book? Do you
think that you were successful in what you set out to
accomplish?
JMG: _Inside a Magical Lodge_
came out of my contacts with the old fraternal orders.
Most people nowadays know next to nothing about fraternal
lodges -- the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, the Knights
of Pythias, the Grange, and so on. A hundred years ago
half the adult population of the US belonged to one
lodge or another, and the lodge system -- the set of
ritual methods, organizational procedures, and habits
evolved by lodges over the years -- was the standard
way to organize most anything in the Western world.
Nearly all the old magical orders used fraternal order
methods; the Golden Dawn copied a lot from the Freemasons,
for example.
In 1992 I joined a fraternal lodge, and found that
its initiations and procedures helped me make much more
sense of the puzzling details of the Golden Dawn system.
I also knew a lot of people in the Pagan and magical
community at that time who were deeply dissatisfied
with ongoing political and organizational troubles,
and it was pretty clear that most of those problems
were caused by the lack of a workable way of managing
organizational issues. I was talking with a Wiccan one
day, swapping stories about some of these problems,
and she finally burst out, "You know what our problem
is? We have too many High Priestesses and not enough
secretaries."
The old lodges didn't have that problem, and were
(and are) able to run their affairs without most of
the difficulties that so often beset modern Pagan and
magical groups. Since I didn't see much chance of getting
Pagans and magicians to join lodges and learn firsthand
how they were run, I decided to do the next best thing
and write a book about it, providing the complete toolkit
for starting and running a magical lodge and encouraging
people to give it a shot.
Was it successful? The book says pretty much exactly
what I wanted it to say, and reviews have been very
favorable. They have also been very, very few. Almost
nobody in the magical community read _Inside a Magical
Lodge_. It's had by far the slowest sales of any of
my books, and nearly all the people who have written
to me about it have been magically inclined Freemasons,
who already know this stuff.
TWPT:
What is the purpose of a magical lodge and why
should someone consider being either a part of
an existing one or starting their own? What advantages
does group magical workings have over solitary ones?
JMG: A magical lodge is a group
working with a particular set of organizational and
ritual tools. You can use those tools for nearly any
imaginable magical or spiritual purpose, but the tools
do have their limits, and they demand practice and commitment.
If you want to hang out with friends and do the occasional
magical working, a magical lodge is probably not for
you. If you want to do intensive magical work with like-minded
people, on the other hand, a magical lodge may be just
what you're looking for.
Group magical workings have three advantages that
solitary work doesn't have. First, you can build up
a lot more energy, and share the energy among participants.
Second, solitary workers tend to exaggerate their own
imbalances-- they tend to do more of what they already
do well, while neglecting the things they don't do well,
and they often choose symbols and approaches that feed
their bad habits rather than countering them. In group
work, the personal imbalances of group members tend
to cancel one another out, since the group has to find
a workable compromise among the needs and desires of
its members. Third, initiation rituals are a lot more
effective if you have a bunch of people pumping energy
into them and one person on the receiving end.
TWPT:
In your next book Natural Magic you explore the
connections between magic and the things that surround
us each and every day, plants, animals etc. , why is
it that we have lost touch with this "natural magic"
in our lives and how does one go about restoring some
of these lost connections?
JMG: How did we lose our connection
to the magical dimensions of everyday life? That's going
to require a little bit of a history lesson.
Three hundred and fifty years ago we had something
called the Scientific Revolution. It's too rarely realized
that this was a revolution in the political sense. First
in Britain, then in other countries in Europe and Europe's
colonies, power passed from landed aristocrats and kings
to business interests. What we call "modern science"
was the ideology of the new ruling class: a worldview
in which nothing exists except matter and energy, in
which nature is nothing but raw material, religion is
purely psychological, and magic is impossible. It's
the perfect belief system for a world in which money
is the prime source of political power.
The interesting thing is that nobody ever actually
proved scientifically that magic doesn't work, that
spirits and gods don't exist, or any of the other things
paraded as definite fact by the publicists of modern
science. You can test magic by experiment...but the
experiments weren't done. The promoters of the Scientific
Revolution simply insisted loudly and repeatedly that
magic had to be impossible, and that was that. When
Rupert Sheldrake did a few experiments on nonphysical
causation a few years back and published the results,
the editors of the very prestigious British science
magazine _Nature_ called for his book to be burnt. Sheldrake
committed what, in scientific terms, is the ultimate
sin: he'd subjected the basic assumptions of science
itself to experimental test, and showed that they don't
hold water.
It's often argued that the ideology of science must
be true, because technology works. By the same logic,
the earth must be the center of the universe, because
navigators in the days before Copernicus were able to
use earth-centered astronomy to navigate by the stars.
Scientists basically take the things that happen to
work and cobble together theories to fit them -- that's
the scientific method. Of course modern science has
a very good working model of how some kinds of matter
function, but it's radically incomplete because it leaves
out so much.
The movie _The Matrix_ revolves around the idea that
the beautiful world we think we inhabit is an illusion,
and the real world is this dark, decaying, inner-city
junkyard place. The reality is exactly the opposite.
For three hundred fifty years, people in the Western
world have convinced themselves that they live in a
bleak world of dead matter spinning in empty space,
when the real universe all around them is aflame with
magic and power and infinite life. We need to wake up
from the trance of scientific materialism and embrace
the dancing powers that surround us at every moment.
How to do that? Natural magic is one part of the
answer. The basic theory of natural magic is that everything
in the world is alive and full of power. By learning
to work with the material substances around us, making
contact with their energies and using them to heal and
bless and shape the world, we begin to wake from our
trance.
TWPT:
It seems that lately I've seen many "encyclopedic"
types of books hitting the streets, what was your motivation
for your new book The New Encyclopedia of the Occult?
JMG: The main inspiration for
the encyclopedia came from my contact with the academic
literature on magic, which is immense these days but
almost totally unknown in the occult community. There's
been a huge amount of research into the history of magic
and Pagan religion in the last few decades, since Dame
Frances Yates and a few other scholars made it respectable
in the academic world. A lot of nonsense has been cleared
away, and a lot of very good translations have made
ancient, medieval and Renaissance magic much more accessible
than it was even a few years ago. Unfortunately most
modern occultists have no idea this has been going on,
and haven't made use of the wealth of new material.
The result is that there's still a fantastic amount
of nonsense passed on as fact in occult circles. You'll
still meet respected Tarot teachers and diviners who
insist that the word "Tarot" comes from the
ancient Egyptian words _tar_, meaning "road,"
and _rog_ or _rosh_, meaning "royal." It takes
about five minutes with a dictionary of ancient Egyptian
to find out that _tar_ doesn't mean "road"
and neither _rog_ nor _rosh_ means "royal";
in fact, they aren't Egyptian words at all. "Royal
road" in Egyptian is _wat nesw_, and if you can
get the word "Tarot" out of that you're doing
better than I am. The whole "royal road" business
comes from an eighteenth-century French crackpot, Antoine
Court de Gebelin, who simply made it up.
Yet the nonsense isn't the worst part of it. Modern
occultists make do with scraps and fragments of ancient
magical traditions, when there's an extraordinary wealth
of material ready to pick up in the scholarly literature.
There are entire systems of ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance magic, published in English translations
with footnotes galore, sitting unused on the shelves
in university libraries, while today's magicians are
content to rehash the same half dozen approaches under
an endless variety of new brand names.
An encyclopedia seemed like the best way to put people
in the occult community in touch with the remarkable
work that's been done by scholars in the last few decades.
Yes, there are other encyclopedias of occult subjects
out there, and some of them are fairly good. I haven't
seen anything that covers the subject the way _The New
Encyclopedia of the Occult_ does.
TWPT:
Is there an underlying arrangement for the material
that you presented in The New Encyclopedia of the Occult?
JMG: Besides alphabetical order?
Not an arrangement so much as a set of common themes
expressed in many different ways. The cross-references
link things together, and readers who follow them will
get a sense of the common patterns.
TWPT:
What kind of research went into producing a book
such as this? What kinds of sources did you find yourself
looking into as background material for this book? Did
you have something this large in mind when you first
started work on this book?
JMG: I was surprised to be able
to make it as short as it turned out. Most of the research
was drawn from the scholarly literature on the history
of magic and Pagan spirituality; I also made contact
with scholars in the field with some specific questions.
One other form of "research" was simply an
effect of the fact that I practice several different
forms of magic. The one real weakness of the academic
literature is that most of the people who write it don't
have any practical experience with magic, and make certain
kinds of mistake as a result.
Normally you expect biologists to write about biology,
and musicians (or at least people who listen to lots
of music) to write about music; with any luck we'll
get to the point someday where people who write scholarly
works on magic have done enough of it that they know
which end of an athame to grab.
TWPT:
Do you find that the term "occult" still
carries with it certain connotations that still come
to mind when the word is used? What does the word occult
represent to you personally and as used in the title
of your latest book?
JMG: I rather like the literal
meaning of the word, which is simply "hidden."
The occult is what's not seen, what's hidden away. Historically
that was true; there's been a huge occult subculture
all through the history of the Western world, including
many very famous historical figures, but until very
recently you could look around and not see a bit of
it. Isaac Newton put more of his time into studying
alchemy than he did into inventing the theory of gravitation,
but you'd be amazed how many biographies of him somehow
manage not to mention that fact!
So the Encyclopedia is a guide to the hidden spiritualities
of the West, the traditions nobody talked about. It's
also a guide to some parts of the hidden history of
the Western world. Magic has been much more influential
in the political sphere than most people suspect. Its
influence hasn't always been positive, either; the Nazi
Party was basically an occult movement -- it quite literally
started out life as the political action wing of a racist
magical lodge in Munich -- and carried a particularly
nasty form of occult philosophy to its logical extreme.
TWPT:
When all is said and done what is it that you
want folks to take away from a book like The New Encyclopedia
of the Occult?
JMG: I'd like them to realize
that the real history of occultism and Pagan spirituality
is a lot more complex, lively, and interesting than
the granny stories and fam-trad mythologies marketed
so often in today's occult community.
People sometimes think that magic, or their particular
tradition of magic or spirituality, is invalidated if
it wasn't handed down in carbon-copy detail by a succession
of identical third-degree grandmothers turned out by
some granny factory in the New Forest. Nothing could
be further from the truth. The sheer creativity of the
occult traditions is one of their greatest sources of
strength; a tradition that remains unchanged for more
than a generation or two is pretty much a museum piece.
It's amusing to watch modern Pagans who would never
settle for a two-year-old computer arguing that their
tradition is better than someone else's because it's
older!
This doesn't mean that we need to forget about our
history, or go about reinventing the wheel all the time.
What it means is that we need a more critical, more
open-ended, and more creative approach to the traditions
-- whatever their sources -- that we've received from
the past.
TWPT:
Is it harder to write a book like this than a
book about a single subject? Seems like it would spread
your focus over a wide variety of topics forcing you
to cut to the meat of each and every topic very quickly.
JMG: Yep. The upside is that
I have material for about another two dozen books on
more specific topics, out of research I did in the process
of getting down to the meat. Expect some projects in
the Druid field first.
TWPT:
Where do you see the study of magic heading over
the next few years? Do you see a growing interest in
the general public about the subject?
JMG: Nowhere but up. The fantastic
success of the Harry Potter novels and films topped
off a period in which magic has moved step by step from
the fringes to the edge of the mainstream. Pagan and
magical groups in the US, the UK, and elsewhere are
getting more media savvy and more professionalism --
it's harder and harder to dismiss today's Pagans as
frosted flakes. The bellowing of the fundamentalists
and the occasional acts of hatemongering worry a lot
of people, but these are actually signs of weakness.
The fundamentalists are scared. They feel momentum slipping
away from them and opinions turning against them. Could
you imagine gay marriage even being mentioned in public
as an issue thirty years ago?
My guess is that one of the modern Pagan religions,
probably some form of Wicca, will become the dominant
religious form in the Western world for the next two
thousand years or so, and the twenty-first century will
see most of that transformation. The momentum is there,
and it's been building for more than two centuries,
since the first public Pagan revivals in England in
the eighteenth century. (Most modern Pagans don't know
that open worship of Pagan gods took place in eighteenth-century
England -- another example of the way our real history
is more interesting than the bogus history so often
circulated!)
TWPT: Tell me
about what you have in store for your readers in the
near future.
JMG: Quite a bit. If all goes
well, I'll have three books out in 2004. Weiser is releasing
a handbook of basic magical training for the solitary
student, which I co-wrote with two other Hermetic magicians;
the working title is _High Magic:
A New Handbook for the Apprentice_. Chivalry Bookshelf
is planning on releasing the first of two volumes of
my translation of a seventeenth-century manual of swordsmanship
based on magical philosophy and sacred geometry; the
title is _Academy of the Sword_, and the author of the
1630 original is Gerard Thibault.
The third, though, the book of mine I'm most looking
forward to seeing in print in 2004, is _A World Full
of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism_, which is under
consideration at a publisher right now. In 2002 I started
trying to work out the philosophical implications of
a universe with many gods, and ended up writing a book
about it. What I discovered is that the case for polytheism
is very strong; if you compare it to either monotheism
or atheism, polytheism makes more sense, begs fewer
questions, and offers more plausible explanations of
things like human religious experience.
The standard literature on theology, philosophy of
religion, and the like ignores polytheism completely.
That's probably not an accident; if you admit the possibility
of many gods, most of the pitched battles in philosophy
of religion pop like bubbles, and you have a hard time
using them to prop up either Judeo-Christian monotheism
or atheist scientific materialism. I'd like to see more
Pagans get involved in theology and philosophy and bring
their own points of view to bear on these old debates,
and this book is an attempt to contribute to that. It
might also be useful as a starting point for Pagan clergy
training in theology -- something that many traditions
are working on nowadays.
For 2005? Expect the first of three books on Druid
spirituality, with the others following close behind.
I have other projects on the back burner as well. This
is an exciting time for me, and for the Pagan and magical
communities as a whole.
TWPT:
Any last thoughts that you would like to share
with our readers that I didn't touch on in my questions?
JMG: I think the words of the
Buddha pretty much sum it up:
Do not believe in what you have heard.
Do not believe in tradition just because it is handed
down over many generations.
Do not believe in anything just because it has been
spoken many times.
Do not believe just because written statements come
from some old sage.
Do not believe in conjecture.
Do not believe in authority or teachers or elders.
But after careful observation and analysis, when
it agrees with reason and it will benefit one and all,
then accept it and live by it.
TWPT:
It has been a pleasure talking to you John and
it sounds like you are going to be a fairly busy guy
in 2004 and beyond. Best of luck to you in all the projects
that you are currently working on. Thanks for your time.
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