I receive email. LOTS of email. And I'm not talking about spam. Before email became popular I received lots of regular "snail" mail. And I mean LOTS of mail. I still receive some, but nowhere near as much as during the years that were P.E. (Pre-Email). Most of the questions and comments I received were surprisingly common. I tried to answer many of them in the "F.A.Q." section of the second edition of Modern Magick. But some letters just stand out. One came from a young man who was fascinated by the Runes. He really wanted to study them and give divinations using them. But his teacher advised him against it. His teacher didn't say that it wasn't part of the system she was teaching.

If you're part of any social networking site, chances are you've seen (or more likely, been deluged) with various fun tests. Some claim to check to see how smart you are (although most of those really only check your memory for trivia) while others claim to reveal aspects of your belief system or psychology. Which Start Trek character are you? What political party should you belong to? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? These on-line tests are all multiple choice and lots of fun. However, they are so simplistic I have to question whether they're useful. Recently I saw a test called "Are You Philosophically Eastern or Western?" Coming from a magickal point of view, discovering the

Imagine a time when the only popular reporting about ceremonial magick involved rituals that involved sex. In a repressive society—one which denounces sex while hypocritically leering at it—this will always be a problem. I remember when the news media only seemed to be interested in Wicca's "Great Rite." Today that has changed (thankfully!), but there's another fad that seems to have replaced this: Tantra. Tantra is actually an ancient spiritual tradition. It may be the world's oldest form of Paganism that has been continually practiced by a large population. It includes rituals, deities, a sigil that can be used like the Kabalistic Tree of Life, divination systems, magickal

Probably my favorite occult magazine of all time was Llewellyn's Gnostica. It covered virtually all aspects of the occult world, from Wicca and Paganism to the paranormal, and on to ceremonial magick. Later, when I came to work at Llewellyn, while looking through files, I discovered that a letter I had written was scheduled to be published in the next issue, an issue that was never printed. It would have been my first writing published in a major magazine. Many people confuse that magazine with Gnosis, another excellent magazine (often reading more like a scholarly journal). It's now gone, but you can get back issues from Fields Book Store in San Francisco. I hope at some time in the future