A MAGICAL EDUCATION A MAGICAL EDUCATION Talks on Magic and Occultism John Michael Greer First published in 2019 by Aeon Books Ltd 12 New College Parade Finchley Road London NW3 5EP Copyright © 2019 by John Michael Greer The right of John Michael Greer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-91280-702-4 Typeset by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India Printed in Great Britain www.aeonbooks.co.uk CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR vii FOREWORD ix CHAPTER ONE A magical education 1 CHAPTER TWO Magical ecology 25 CHAPTER THREE The secret history of Neopaganism 41 CHAPTER FOUR Victorian sex magic 67 CHAPTER FIVE Understanding Renaissance magic 87 v vi CONTENTS CHAPTER SIX Magic, metapolitics, and reality 109 CHAPTER SEVEN Alchemical initiation 129 CHAPTER EIGHT Healing through the elements 149 CHAPTER NINE Paganism and the future 171 INDEX 197 ABOUT THE AUTHOR One of the most widely respected voices in contemporary occult studies, John Michael Greer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn, and Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic. An initiate in Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Greer served as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) for twelve years. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old mill town in the Appalachian mountains of western Maryland, with his wife Sara. John Michael Greer is also the author of four books on peak oil and the future of industrial society, The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature and Not The Future We Ordered, and also blogs weekly on politics, magic, and the future of industrial society at www. ecosophia.net. vii FOREWORD The talks included in this book were all written and presented during the decade that ran from 2001 to 2010, when I was a regu- lar presenter at Pagan and occult conferences in various corners of North America. All of them were presented several times to a variety of audiences and adapted for each presentation to address issues that happened at that time to be of particular interest to their listeners, or to me. There were others—all told, I must have given upwards of thirty different talks to such conferences during those years—but these are the ones that I was most often requested to give, and the ones that people since that time have most often asked me to make available in printed form. I’ve resisted the temptation to turn these talks into essays: to reorga- nize them to fit some less fluid narrative outline, equip them with the standard scholarly impedimenta of footnotes and bibliographies, and so on. The point of talks like these is to inspire curiosity and reflection, not to set out an ironclad case for this or that point of view; readers of this volume, like members of these talks’ original audiences, will have to chase down the books and other sources I’ve cited by themselves— though in the age of Google this is hardly a difficult task. The one exception is “Healing Through The Elements”; audiences for that talk ix