Occult Books and The Sound of Suction

[Silenciumetaurum]

Sometimes, when I talk about occult books, I feel like one of the rock snobs in High Fidelity. Take Matt Auryn's recent occult literary sensation, Mastering Magick, for example. I read it. It's not bad. It's not good. But it's not bad. Maybe it's good for beginners. Maybe it's bad for jaded old sorcerers like me, who think they've seen it all before. Maybe, if I put out the effort to take it seriously, it could teach me a thing or three about magic(k) and psychism (his previous book, Psychic Witch, too). Maybe I should get off my high horse, stop looking down my nose at mass-market witchsplaining books introduced by Silver Ravenwolf and published by Llewellyn, and accept that I am a sneering elitist of the worst sort. I'm an asshole. I'm ruining the suburban witchy slumber party. Back when Teen Witch came out, I felt a deep, quivering urge to use its pages as hygenic paper and thought, what if I'm just a raspy old arrogant bastard who thinks he knows things and just has a bunch of opinions?

Yeah, but Mastering Magick sucks. And that's the problem. When you read something like Huson's Mastering Witchcraft and then look at Auryn's Mastering book, well, don't do that—especially if you spent money on the latter. But maybe it doesn't actually suck. Maybe, as High Fidelity puts it, "You're totally elitist. You feel like an unappreciated scholar. So you shit on the people who know less than you." Well, what occultist who's read more than one book on the subject doesn't feel like an unappreciated feculent scholar? And yet, and yet . . . the book sucks. Doesn't it?

I feel like I can't escape the suction. I also just read Ian Chambers' The Witch Compass: Working with the Winds in Traditional Witchcraft and thought it was really interesting and well written. Should I be comparing a book marketed to the edgelord trad-craft demographic with one marketed to the post-Wiccan suburban witchsplaining demographic? I should not! Yet . . . the YouTube shillwitches are shilling and the Join My Exclusive Discord Server Occultnik Magical Professors are professing. And what they're shilling and professing is that Mastering Magick is the real deal. The knees of the bees. The True and Authentic Nexus of Magic(k) and Witchcraft for the day Karen rinses out her temporary goth dye job and accepts that there was something to those crystals and purple altar cloths after all.

For fuck's sake, I'm confused. Maybe it's just the fucking marketing. Maybe I'm cynical. Maybe I've labored too long in the intellectual gulag of 1980s-style DIY witchcraft manuals that function as the occulty equivalent of laxitive tapioca pudding. I don't know. I just don't know.

https://youtu.be/QOwjVVSNOtY?t=108