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Running with the Devil
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music by Robert Walser. This scholarly monograph regarding heavy metal music and culture...
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A Fire Upon the Deep
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I’ve been pretty tardy getting around to this lauded novel from the early 1990s, despite my efforts in recent years to...
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The Devil’s Own Dear Son
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Devil’s Own Dear Son by James Branch Cabell. The Devil’s Own Dear Son was Cabell’s fiftieth book (by his own count), and, I think, his last novel. He...
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Isaac Newton’s Freemasonry
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Isaac Newton’s Freemasonry: The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism by Alain Bauer. Alain Bauer quotes André Carvalle regarding Stuartist Masonry with a phrase...
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The Angel & The Abyss
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Angel & The Abyss: The Inward Journey, Books II & III by J Daniel Gunther. This sequel volume to Initiation in the Aeon of the Child reveals the...
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Natural Right and History
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss. This book was developed out of a set of lectures given by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in 1949. It...
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The Kingdom of Evil
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare by Ben Hecht. When I first read it, I would not have guessed that Ben Hecht’s...
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Living Thelema
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Living Thelema: A Practical Guide to Attainment in Aleister Crowley’s System of Magick by David Shoemaker. Living Thelema is a brand that David Shoemaker...
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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti, foreword by Jeff VanderMeer. This volume collects Thomas Ligotti’s first two books of short...
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The Shadow Club
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Shadow Club: The Greatest Mystery in the Universe—Shadows—and the Thinkers Who Unlocked Their Secrets by Roberto Casati. This engaging book is written...
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“Our forefather, Aleister Crowley wrote that we “have the right to live by...
“Our forefather, Aleister Crowley wrote that we “have the right to live by our own law.” This is not a call to anarchy, but to openly and shamelessly be whom we are, to demand the freedom to be this...
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Conan: The Sword of Skelos
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Conan: The Sword of Skelos by Andrew Offutt. I first read this one as a teenager, encountering it as number 3 in the Bantam Conan pastiche novel series. It...
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All Things Are Lights
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews All Things Are Lights by Robert Shea. This doorstop volume is something like a hipper, sexier version of the medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott. Its...
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“Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our...
“Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry &...
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The San Veneficio Canon
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The San Veneficio Canon by Michael Cisco. The San Veneficio Canon joins under one cover two short novels by Michael Cisco: his lauded 1999 debut The...
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Hazard
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Hazard: The Risk of Realization by John G Bennett, with a foreword by A G E Blake. I had been aware of J.G. Bennett’s standing as a teacher in the...
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Mercenaries of Gor
Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Mercenaries of Gor by John Norman. Whether John Norman’s “counter-earth” Gor was ever intended to be an innocent sword-and-planet-epic or was always meant...
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John Ruf
Join me in welcoming John Ruf as the newest Fellow at the library. John Ruf is a hipster hermetic kabbalist with atheist overtones, an expert curator of content, and has some seriously good tastes in...
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John Griogair Bell
I have added John Griogair Bell, as a new Fellow section for my own writing and work at the library. I’ve added resources that have been over at either my personal blog or website, as well as a number...
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“Nostalgia can be contained and marketed—but actual difference would threaten...
Nostalgia can be contained and marketed—but actual difference would threaten the hegemony of the one worldview. The “Gift Economy” of some nearly-extinguished “primitive tribe” makes excellent TV; our...
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