When I was very young, I loved to watch and listen to baseball games. I'd fall asleep listening on the radio to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett* call the Dodgers games. I started playing little league baseball, and in my last year I had the highest batting average in the league. Today, I find listening to baseball or even watching it incredibly boring. For me, there is just no way sitting on your behind and being passive can compare to actually playing the game. When I first started studying magick and occultism, I didn't know anyone who was actually trained in the subjects. As a result, I did a lot of study out of books. Some of the books were really good. Others, I came to realize, were

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

I have been studying the Tarot and giving readings with it for many decades, thousands of readings. I used to give readings at psychic fairs for as many as forty people a day. That can be really exhausting. The Tarot was one of my earliest occult studies. I've read hundreds of books on the Tarot. I wrote the introduction for one book on the subject (The Rabbi's Tarot), use the Tarot as part of the work in my own books, including Modern Magick, and wrote an entire book on the subject, Tarot & Magic. My novel, The Resurrection Murders, includes the use of the Tarot, too. I was awarded the title of Tarot Grandmaster by the American Tarot Association. I'm sharing these bona fides