On Reading Occult Books
“Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.
Virginia Woolf, “How one should read a book”, The Second Common Reader, 1925.
How do we go about reading an occult book? It seems like an obvious question to ask, but thus far, I have yet to see any attempt to explore this issue in any depth. This is strange, given how much occult books are part of contemporary occult practice. The effort and expense we go to acquire them, how we cherish them, and how books influence our trajectories and shape our ideas.
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