The other day I was at a friend's house and we began talking about books. I have several thousand books on various occult topics. Some are very old. Others are quite new. My friend and I both knew of people who had well over ten thousand books, although most were fiction, especially fantasy or science fiction. I started wondering about why people keep large quantities of books. For me, it is so I can do research. Why people keep vast quantities of fiction, since I don't do that, I can't say. But when you go into someone's home and there are shelves that make the place look like a bookstore or library it's, I don't know, impressive? weird? It certainly tells you a great deal about the

Good News I begin this post with some good news. Twenty-five years ago, while I was deeply studying the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, I was looking for aspects of the tradition that few people were researching. I came across a complex divination system used by that Order known as Enochian Chess. Enochian Chess is a completely unique system. Although it uses a standard-sized chessboard, each square was seen as a "truncated pyramid," looking like a pyramid with a square bottom and its top cut off. That resulted in each square having five spaces for information on it. Truncated Pyramid as Seen from Above But that's not all. Enochian Chess has four players instead of

It's my observation that many people are looking into their pasts. These pasts may be genetically based ("My great-great grandparents came from…") or spiritually based ("I feel such a pull to the ________ tradition…"). This can be a great thing or it can be a horrible thing. This was brought up in a wonderful post by Taylor Ellwood entitled "Cultural exchange vs cultural appropriation." Although I agree with Mr. Ellwood's conclusions, we have some disagreements over the details that get there. He states that "[c]ultural appropriation is the wholesale stealing of a given culture's practices." I respectfully disagree. For example, if someone who was not of a particular culture

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Karen Page, author of My Life Across the Table. I have been very blessed to meet and read for thousands of people all over the world, and have found that for most human beings—no matter the country of residence, language spoken, chosen vocation, or religion—the threads that bind us together are the same. We all want to be safe, be able to pay our bills, make sure our children are cared for and protected, be healthy and vital…and of course we want to feel loved. We all live someplace, work someplace, and hopefully have meaningful relationships in our lives. On the surface of our lives, the everyday things that we share appear to be