The human mind is not formed in a vacuum. It absorbs language, images, structures and arguments from the texts a person consumes. Reading is not entertainment or a way to pass an evening: it is an act of building oneself from within. Books are what shape the field of thought that we later call a worldview or a picture of reality. You cannot think with what you do not possess. You cannot even ask a question if you lack the words in which to ask it. All of this is a consequence of reading—or of its absence.
At the first stage of development, experience cannot yet serve as a source of truth. Experience is always a fact that has been interpreted. And to interpret it, you need a framework into which it fits. Where does that framework come from? Only from reading, from encountering other people’s ways of reasoning, other worlds, and everything that came before you. There is no personal path without first engaging with tradition. Tradition is books. It is text.
When someone says they have figured everything out on their own and have no need of books, you are looking at either an ignoramus or an impostor. Not one serious occultist, philosopher or magician started from nothing. They all travelled the path of a reader. Crowley read for ten hours a day. Jung built an entire library of meanings. Losev knew that the word is the foundation of thought. Without words, you have no thinking. There is only a stream of mental chewing-gum that can be mistaken for intuition or experience.
It is particularly amusing to watch self-proclaimed tarot readers, witches and masters who cannot put together a coherent sentence. This is not even a question of grammar; it is a question of inner emptiness. Errors of language are not merely failures of spelling; they are holes in one’s picture of the world. And when such a person begins speaking on behalf of higher powers, energies or spirits, one wants to ask a simple question: in what words do these spirits speak to you if you have no language in your head?
Then there is the separate comedy of appeals to personal mystical experience. It is the favourite phrase of anyone wishing to give their inner chaos an aura of infallibility. But religious studies teaches us something simple: an experience of the sacred is always interpreted. Even the most powerful vision, the brightest feeling, the most seemingly undeniable truth received in a trance or a dream says nothing without an interpretive framework. One person sees an angel and decides it is a message. Another sees the same angel and concludes it is psychosis. Why? Because their frameworks of interpretation differ. And where do those frameworks come from? From reading.
If you want to speak about magic, occultism and esotericism, start with something simple. Read at least ten authoritative books. Here is a list without unnecessary rubbish:
Recommended Reading
- Aleister Crowley — Magick in Theory and Practice, The Book of the Law, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings
- Éliphas Lévi — Dogma and Ritual of High Magic
- Papus — Practical Magic, Kabbalah
- Carl Gustav Jung — Archetype and Symbol, Psychology and Alchemy
- Mircea Eliade — Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions
- Frances Yates — Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic Tradition
- Aleksei Losev — History of Ancient Aesthetics, The Dialectics of Myth
- René Guénon — The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times
- Arnold van Gennep — The Rites of Passage
Read. Remember. Copy passages out by hand. Learn to think. Only then will you cease to be the object of someone else’s will and become the subject of your own.