The Book Game

Gordon at Rune Soup has presented a “game” that has been firing up the magickal blogosphere. Here is the idea:

Let’s say you would like to introduce someone to the world of magick using only books. This person is going to be in a deserted house with no outside communication for a month and they’ve agreed to read whatever you tell them, in the order that you tell them. Here, quoted from Rune Soup, are the rules:

1. Fiction is allowed.
2. You have to specify what brand of magician you want to build beforehand. (Hermeticist, chaos, etc.)
3. You can’t tell the subject this.
4. You must include books from at least three disciplines. (This is to stop you just giving the Complete Golden Dawn and then declaring the subject a GD-style magician at the end.)
5. It’s only books. No guru teaching, no magical training. Just books. (It’s a book game.) Presume they will do the exact same amount of exercises out of the books that you did.
6. The subject goes into the house without any belief in magic. They are a smug, modern agnostic.
7. A maximum of ten titles. Trilogies count as three books.

So several people have already posted their lists. Frankly, the lists sound far more like “these are my favorite books” than “these are the books that will introduce someone to the world of magick.” My real problem with the entire concept, however, is most people who have followed popular culture are already familiar with magick or magickal concepts. After all, this is just an “introduction,” it doesn’t mean that someone will end up believing anything.

But what the heck. Let’s play along. I’d like to help someone become introduced to Tantric Magick. Here’s my suggested reading…

1) First I would want to give the person a more scientific approach to the concept so he has at least a more scientific understanding of what’s going on. So I’d start with Ecstasy Through Tantra by Jonn Mumford. The goal with this book is to simply feed someone information into the subject’s head.

2) Next, we have to break down the subject’s hold on what is “real.” I think I might start with Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It’s a graphic novel so the concepts of time and what is real and the nature of good and evil are “safe” to approach.

3, 4, 5) I’d follow this up with some real brain salad surgery in the form of SSOTBME by Ramsey Dukes, then Thundersqueak by Liz Angerford, Ambrose Lea, and Ramsey Dukes. I’d follow those two up with BLAST Your Way To Megabuck$ with my SECRET Sex-Power Formula by Dukes. Mr. Dukes has an amazing knack for being able to start you on the reasonable and logical, follow a perfectly logical path, and lead you to amazing personal and spiritual revelations.

6) Once the person’s mind is prepped and opened, I’d bring in some modern concepts of sex magick with my novel, The Resurrection Murders. It explains magick and the use of sexuality and sexual energy for magick.

7) Next, move back to Tantra with a rare and out of print book entitled Cosmic Sex by Kane Omega. This novel explains how a man is able to discover his own path to Tantric sexuality.

No we’re ready to go in with the big guns:

8 ) Tantra Magick by AMOOKOS (Michael Magee) contains many of the teachings of the Tantric magickal order known as AMOOKOS.

9) Supplemental reading: copies of Sothis Magazine from decades ago that feature Tantric writing from Sri Mahendranath Maharaj (Dadaji).

Well, those are my suggestions. These are not necessarily my favorite books to teach magick of any kind, but there are the rules and limitations put on this game and I think this order would fit with them.

What books would you give to a person so they could be introduced to some form of magick, and what form of magick would that be?