Rita

How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, foreword by Martin Gardner


Yet another book about thinking that I am about to deacquisition for sloppy thinking. Ironic isn't it? I will give two examples. The authors make much of the idea that Babylonian astrologers did not survey people about personality traits to determine the efficacy of astrology. If they had actually studied the history of astrology, they would have known that the current personality trait style of astrology was not what early astrologers did. They were more concerned with the fate of nations--predicting storms, quakes, floods, invasions and so forth, predicting events in the ruler's life that might affect the nation: will he have heirs, will he die in battle, etc. The contemporary emphasis on intangibles such as personality is a reaction to the rise of scientific criticism of astrology rather than part of the original mission.

Homeopathy is another subject that the authors have apparently not bothered to inform themselves about. I have read accounts of trials of homeopathic remedies that really ignore the basis of the treatment. For instance, the researchers may decide to gather a reasonable number of people who have a common cold and give half of them THE homeopathic remedy for the common cold. There is no such thing. Anyone who has had more than one cold in their life knows that what we lump together as colds can run different courses. Some start with a sore throat, turn into a chest cough and gradually clear up. Some start with copious runny mucus, a red nose, postnasal drip, etc. For a homeopathic practitioner these are two different conditions that would require different remedies. And even two people with the same general symptoms might receive a different remedy depending on their food cravings, sleep patterns, psychological state or previous history of receiving remedies. The authors, following general science, dismiss higher potency (more diluted) remedies as having nothing of the original substance in them. Well, no one educated in the theory would claim they do. Homeopathic theory says that the energy pattern of the original substance has been transferred and increased by agitation. Since modern science refuses to try to detect or measure the theorized energy patterns this explanation is dismissed as nonsense. Dismissing a system because you don't understand its principles is like dismissing literature in a foreign language.

I thoroughly approve of teaching people how to approach novel or mysterious claim; how to detect flaws in logic and arguments, but distorting the actual history and theory of claims you are testing is not the way to do it.

Newton's work in alchemy is usually treated as an anomaly given his role as founder of modern physics. Dobbs demonstrates that Newton was one of a number of scientists who continued to find value in the concepts of alchemy. Among these concepts was a belief that all matter was ultimately one, an idea related to Neoplatonism, a philosophy with renewed popularity in Cambridge. Robert Boyle, regarded as the father of modern chemistry, had not completely abandoned the concepts of alchemy in his work. Indeed he published an account of transmuting water to earth through a series of workings. Numbers of other scientists were attempting to reconcile alchemy with the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes. Newton may have performed experiments along these lines but found them inadequate. As a believer in prisca sapeintia or ancient wisdom, the idea that in earliest times God had granted wisdom and knowledge to the prophets no longer available to moderns, Newton began to read earlier alchemical texts, trying to discern the practical knowledge he thought was concealed by the elaborate symbols and metaphor and mystical language. Ironically modern atomic theory has led to knowledge that matter is all composed of the same basic particles and that transmutation of one element into another is possible although not in ways imagined earlier.

The distorted view of Newton's researches was made possible when his texts, his reading notes and his laboratory records on alchemy were separated from his other work, sold off and archived in different locations. A large amount was purchased by John Meynard Keynes, the economist, and ultimately bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in the late 1930s. By this time, Newton's reputation as first of the modern scientists was so fixed that the idea that he seriously worked with an obsolete, mystical superstition such as alchemy was difficult to assimilate. Dobbs set to work to examine the works that Newton read, which included published works and manuscripts passed from one student or professor to another; the writings of others at Cambridge in his time there; and Newton's notebooks, which contained detailed accounts of his experiments and his results. She makes clear that nothing Newton was doing was irrational or unscientific by the standards of his time.

We now know that it is not possible to turn lead into gold my mixing it with other chemicals, heating, cooling, distilling, grinding, etc. We may never have studied chemistry and have only the vaguest idea of why gold is heavy and yellow or how sodium combines with chlorine to create table salt. But we understand that mercury is a specific substance, not a quality shared by a number of metals--that a mercury of iron makes no sense. But the experimenters of Newton's time did not know these things--Sulphur and mercury were not specific things but qualities, as were salts and acids. Newton believed Boyes accounts of having obtained earth from water by a complex series of distillations. He also believed that agitation, heat and fermentation could "open" a substance, making it possible for transmuting substance to enter.

In this work Dobbs treats Newton's early and middle work, saving investigation of his later career to another book.

As a long-time Pagan how can I resist a version of the story of King Arthur titled _The Pagan King_ ? Well actually I resisted it for some time. Don't even recall how I acquired it but have been giving it shelf space and moving it for a couple of decades. Finally I read it.

This is not a new book but appears to be one of the earlier efforts (1959) to write a more historically likely story of the legendary King Arthur. While I would agree that this version of the Arthurian myth seems to have more historically accurate detail than the versions based on Mallory's Middle Ages, it does have its problems. Ambrose, who becomes Artay and then Arthur, is a rustic living with the old druid Merdin, a serving woman who never speaks, and Gerald, a 1/4 Roman who teaches him swordsmanship and tactics and eventually becomes his general. Merdin eventually reveals that Ambrose is the son of Vortigern and his first queen, exposed to die by the King's order and rescued by Merdin. When Ambrose fights and wounds his half-brother Mordred at the King's Beltane games, his identity is revealed and he and the household must flee. Ambrose eventually puts together a small band of followers which grows larger as he defeats other rulers and eventually Vortigern. In the meantime, a prophetic song says that he must wed a woman named Wander, but he has fallen in love with Elain of the lake and is bedeviled with lust for Vivain, who claims to be of Witch blood and have prophetic dreams.

The changes that Marshall rings upon the basic Arthurian story are interesting. However his treatment of his pagan characters is uneven. Merdin, for example is called a druid, not a wizard, yet professes admiration for the law and order than the Romans had enforced in Britain. This seems strange given that the Romans banned and massacred the Druids. Merdin seems to feel that he is serving a sacred cause in trying to fulfill the predictions of Arthur's ruler ship, yet he lies and deceives in the furtherance of that cause, which doesn't seem to display much faith in the gods. Artay is also inconsistent. For instance at one point he vows to Elain, in the names of the Great Gods, that he will free 5 prisoners who otherwise would be hanged. But a few pages later he seems to have forgotten this pledge and has to be persuaded by Merdin to free a particular criminal for purely strategic reasons. Another time a character refers to the false gods of the Saxons. Pagans were not generally given to considering the gods of other peoples as false, merely not their gods. The idea of false gods is a Christian one (or Jewish in origin). Why would a Briton accept that he worships Lud and Romans worship Jove, yet regard the Saxon Odin as false? The characters also speak and act as though Christians were rare in Britain, yet the Romans did not leave until some time after Constantine's conversion, so a good number of Romans or Romanized Britons would have been Christians. Many of these details would not be noticed by readers unfamiliar with the history, but they are distracting for those who do.

Unbelievable: Seven Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion
Michael Newton Keas

Many of the arguments in this book will be familiar to readers of John Michael Greer's Ecosophia. However the book contains some material that Greer has not touched on, as well as the author's own interpretation of the reasons that the myths about the subject seem to grow stronger rather than being overturned by more historical knowledge.

As the Firesign Theater used to say, "everything you know is wrong." In this case the subject is myths about the interaction of science and religion--everyone knows that the Christian Dark Ages were a time in which the rule of the Church prevented any progress in science; everyone knows that Galileo was silenced for agreeing with Copernicus and that the reason Copernicus was unacceptable to the Church was that taking the earth from the center of the solar system meant demoting humankind from the center of God's attention. Oh, almost forgot, the earth was flat and everyone thought Columbus would sail off the edge.

Wrong on these and other counts, says Michael Newton Keas, a lecturer in the history and philosophy of science. In fact, he asserts, any Medieval university student worth his salt could present the proofs that the earth was a sphere--and advanced scholars were very close in estimates of its size. Columbus had it wrong, and if not for the convenient existence of the Western Hemisphere he would not have sailed off the edge, but would have perished of starvation or thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Similarly, Galileo was silenced because he argued beyond his actual evidence. He wrote a book in which the conventional view, that supported by the Pope, was put into the mouth of a character named Simplicio. Not the smoothest political move. Somehow I can envision Galilea gleefully creating memes to mock his opponents. He supported the theory that the earth moved by the evidence of tides, likening them to water sloshing in a moving container. Unfortunately for this theory, it only accounted for one tide per day, not the two that actually exist.

The author gives other examples and claims that the myth of religion vs. science is a relatively recent one originating partially in anti-Catholic prejudice but extending to Christianity in general. He traces the increased use of the trope in popular science talks, such as Sagan and Tyson, and in science textbooks. Interesting read, in particular when he writes about the influence of science fiction on the vision of humanity meeting ET.

The object of this book is to dispel the myth that religion, Christianity in particular, has been the historic enemy of science and that most of human history has been spent in abysmal ignorance of the facts about the size and nature of the universe.

Keas lists seven particular myths that he wishes to dispel:
1. That pre-modern scholars believed the universe was small and made for the benefit of humankind.
2. That the Roman Catholic Church opposed science, causing a dark ages in Medieval times.
3. That intellectuals believed in a flat earth until Columbus' travels proved otherwise.
4. That Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for supporting the Copernican theory.
5. That Galileo was imprisoned and silenced for telescopic observations that supported Copernicus.
6. That the Copernican theory demoted humans from the privileged center of the universe
7. That a discovery of extraterrestrial life will destroy Christianity.

His rebuttals are briefly summarized as:

1. Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in comparison to the universe and that in any case, size does not indicate significance. He cites a number of early thinkers to the effect that the cosmos is unimaginably large and quotes Psalm 8:3-5 to demonstrate that such an acknowledgement is compatible with the idea of a God who cares for humanity.

2. That the Church was largely responsible for preserving learning in monasteries, not in destroying it.

3. It is perfectly clear from many sources that the earth as a sphere was known from Greek times and the argument against Columbus was that he was working with the smallest estimate of its size, which most believed to be inaccurate and that if larger estimates were true he would run out of provisions long before reaching China. Which was absolutely true--if not for the existence of the Americas, Columbus would have died.

4. Bruno was actually executed for professed disbelief in the Trinity, a heresy which has nothing to do with science.

5. Galileo had been ordered not to defend Copernican theory, yet published a book in dialogue form in which the arguments against it were put in the mouth of a character made to seem a simpleton, a fairly direct insult to the pope who had been his friend and defender. Given that there were three competing theories at the time, the Church was essentially waiting for more evidence before confusing the laity with information that might challenge passages in Scripture. One can certainly argue that the Roman Catholic Church was not an appropriate institution to vet scientific theory, but given that many students of natural philosophy were clergy and that universities were all religious institutions at the time, it was probably inevitable that it took on that role.

6. In the traditional view of the cosmos the center is not the repository of good; it is the material sink to which the dross of the universe falls. Hence the idea that Hell is at the center of the Earth. The heavens are the place of unmarred, pure spirit.

7. Keas regards the hope for Extraterrestrial life of unimaginable technological prowess as similar to fantasies that Artificial Intelligence will reach a point at which it can solve all the problems of humankind. Both of these imagined futures are assumed by most who promote them to make religious salvation unnecessary and can be seen as in competition with religion for the allegiance of humans.

Keas does not content himself with disputing the truth of his list of myths. He also traces the origins of these myths and the means of their promulgation. Somewhat surprisingly he shows that the ideas are actually more prevalent now than in the past, probably because they have been repeated in textbooks at different levels and feature in popular media presentations on science. He points out that even Neil deGrasse Tyson, who should know better, has repeated the myth that the spherical nature of the earth was forgotten or suppressed during the Middle Ages.

Keas does a fairly complete job of demonstrating that some scientists have participated in a campaign to convince the public that science has struggled against entrenched prejudice and opposition from the leaders of the Christian religion from earliest times. Keas himself is a proud Christian apologist who writes to protect his religion from unfair accusations.

But to me, the interesting question is why scientists would themselves cling to these myths. Even a superficial study of intellectual history reveals the number of committed scientists who were equally committed Christians. Nor is Christianity the most unusual belief to be found among the greats: Sir Isaac Newton was, after all, an alchemist (and another anti-Trinitarian, but had the sense to confine that to his private writings). Yet here in the 21st century, when scientists in the Western world at least are completely safe from any inquisition or persecution by religious bodies they seem to feel a need to define themselves as fearless pioneers in a sea of superstition.

It is true that there are signs of rebellion against science--anti-vaccination activists come to mind. But few anti-vaxxers base their beliefs on specifically religious doctrine, although they may profess a vague belief in the power of nature. And of course the United States suffers from the ongoing campaign to force creation science or intelligent design into public schools. However it seems clear that these myths are a weapon used to defend SCIENCE against any criticism of its methods or conclusions. Anyone who doubts science or scientists can be cast as an enemy of free inquiry in general, intent on dragging humanity back to the horrors of the Inquisition.

The Neil Gaiman Reader
Darrell Schweitzer, ed.
Wildside Press, 2007

One of the many books on my shelves snatched up eagerly when brought to my notice by a review or catalog entry or when spotted on a bookstore shelf, then nestled in the 'books to read' pile until buried by newer acquisitions. It is survival by random chance on my bookshelves. Then carried to my car for the book to be read while waiting in line or grabbing a meal out. Ooops, COVID 19, shelter-in-place, no eating out, etc. But I finally finished. The first five essays are on the _Sandman_, the series that lured me back into the world of comics (graphic novels). Back when my kids were in elementary school the fad was for collecting stickers. So every allowance day my daughter would beg to be driven to the local source, a now defunct Comics and Comix, which had an entire wall of rolls of stickers. Bored, I began browsing the comics, which I hadn't looked at since I was a child. I had never been a fan of superhero comics so passed over the DC Universe and the Marvel World. But there was a comic peeping out with "The Kindly Ones" on the cover. Hummmm, I say to myself, could there be a comic book about those 'kindly ones,' the ladies called that in a usually futile attempt to divert their attentions? Yes--the Eumenides were indeed the subject of this strange comic. Hooked, I started back at the beginning and read the whole series. I encountered a website that annotated the work--amazing piece of amateur scholarship. And hence I was introduced to the world of adult comics and graphic novels. Soon enough I was haunting Comic and Comix waiting for the next trade compilation of Garth Ennis' _Preacher_ because I was writing an academic paper on the working class vampire character, Cassidy.

But, back to _The Neil Gaiman Reader_. Two excellent interviews, one from 1995, one from 2000. Four essays on the _Sandman_, and essays on _Neverwhere_, _Stardust_, _American Gods_ and _Coraline_. Analysis of Gaiman's use of mythology, of stories within stories, flashbacks and metafiction are also of interest. Lesser known works such as _Violent Cases and _The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch_ also receive attention. As in any anthology the essays vary in style and quality, but all are worth reading. All in all, if you are a fan of literary analysis and a fan of fantasy and a fan of Gaiman, or any of the above, you may want to read this book. It is still in print and available from the publisher at www.wildsidepress.com. Given Gaiman's productivity the bibliography is out of date, however it includes links to online updates that appear to be comprehensive.

A sequel to _Shoggoth Concerto_. Branken Kendall is settled in Arkham, living as caretaker for a former Miskatonic faculty member while beginning her musical career. Her great secret is a loving partnership with an adult shoggoth and her six broodlings. A series of apparent coincidences lead her to compose a chamber opera from Oscar Wilde's translation of _The King in Yellow_. Greer does an excellent job of conveying the creative process: the faint tickling of an idea, the absent-minded preoccupation with working it out, the absorption in a project and the mingled joy and anxiety of completion. Add the tinge of danger as the reader senses the hostile forces of the Radiance closing in and the work becomes a genuine page turner.

Spiro Dimolianis has amassed an impressive amount of evidence and speculation regarding the Whitechapel Murders, also known as the Jack the Ripper case. Dimolianis’s claims to connect the case with the history of supernatural beliefs, secret societies, and the occult in Victorian England promise a provocative work. He introduces much tantalizing information— mentioning gypsies; Jewish folklore; theosophy; and, the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. How much is new is a question for confirmed Ripper scholars. Unfortunately, this information is presented in such a jumbled and incoherent state that it is daunting to follow any thread through to a conclusion. The book begins with references to mediums and ends with attempts to link the Ripper case to the struggle for Irish independence.

Large portions of documents are printed verbatim, leaving the reader to decide what points are pertinent. For example, in a discussion of Dr. Roslyn D’Onston, Dimolianis reproduces more than a page of testimony about night-nursing staff procedures in London Hospital (85). D’Onston was a patient in the hospital, which abuts the Whitechapel area, during the period of the murders. Could he have slipped out to commit the crimes while retaining a seemingly irrefutable alibi? The description of large wards left unattended for long periods during the night may whet the reader’s appetite for a conclusion that D’Onston is a prime suspect. However, a few pages later the author concludes that it is unlikely that D’Onston could have, on three separate occasions, escaped the attention of the nursing staff and the night porter at the locked hospital gate (87).

The photographs included, and their captions, betray a scattershot approach to intriguing the reader. One example, a double exposure of a man in two theatrical poses is accompanied by this caption:

"Actor Richard Mansfield in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde whose performance at the Lyceum before the Jack the Ripper murders was so convincing it was believed he was capable of the Whitechapel crimes. On October 5, 1888, the City of London Police received a letter signed “M.P.,” who, having seen the play, 'felt at once that he was the man wanted'” (47).

No further information is given in the text. One suspects that this letter was treated much as one accusing actor Anthony Hopkins of similar crimes based on a viewing of _The Silence of the Lambs_ would be by police today. A photograph of Crowley’s mother, with the note that she dubbed him “the Beast,” is even more tenuously connected to the case, since Crowley was only 13 in 1888 and unlikely to have ever set foot in the East End before or during the period of the murders (123).

Another photograph’s caption makes little sense at all:

"Pope Leo XIII held the papacy during the Whitechapel murders and troubled Anglo-Irish relations of the period. In 1884 he issued the Humanum Genus which banned all secret societies for Catholics. Driving them further underground promoted speculation that Jack the Ripper was a protected member of such a society." (57)

Neither the chronology nor the logic of this statement holds up. A pope banning secret societies would have little effect in Protestant England. And how can a decree made in 1884 be seen as protection for crimes committed four years later? This seems like a gratuitous attempt to drag the Roman Catholic Church into the case. It probably is relevant that the immigrant populations of the East End included Irish, Poles, and other predominantly Catholic peoples. But their church’s ban on secret societies has no clear relationship to whether the Ripper was among their number, unless one is advancing a case for an outlaw group of Roman Catholics forming an assassins’ society, which no one appears to have suggested at the time. Elsewhere, Dimolianis mentions theories that the Ripper was a lower-class Polish Jew, or a Jewish ritual butcher. In contrast to the Leo XIII caption, this seems to be legitimate information about the types of conspiracy theories that were in circulation at the time, especially in view of the fact that police examined the knives of Jewish butchers.

The most disappointing aspect of this work is its lack of clear organization. The author jumps from one topic to the next without clearly developing his ideas. Nowhere does he provide a timeline of the crimes, a list of victims, a list of major suspects, or a map of the territory. The latter would have been of material aid in the section dealing with occult theories, since we are told that the locations of the murders were believed by some to form an occult symbol—a cross or a pentacle, depending on the theory. Much of the information given is not related to the case. For example, the history of theosophy and its leaders could be condensed, as could the discussion on Robert Anderson, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. What relevance do Anderson's views on a revised translation of the Bible have to his handling of a murder investigation? Is the author implying that his religious conservatism contributed to his willingness to implicate the Jewish population by his theory that an unnamed, unindicted Jewish lunatic was known to the police to have been the killer? This claim is cited at length and discussed in more than one section of the book. However, it is never clear why such an allegation would make sense. Information about the treatment of lunatics under British law at the time would have been helpful.

Those who try to collect everything written on the topic of the Ripper murders will probably wish to add this book to their libraries. The specialist in search of previously unpublished information may discover nuggets that make the search worthwhile. However, for the reasons given above, it is not a work for the general reader.

Spiro Dimolianis
Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.
229 pp. $38.00.

Review originally published in _Clues_ 32.1 (2014) 108-09, reprinted by permission of McFarland and Co.

It is needless to praise this book as it has already received an Edgar award for best factual crime for 2018 from the Mystery Writers of America. Grann has produced a heavily researched account of a major case handled by the then new FBI. Mysterious deaths and outright murders had plagued the Osage Tribe, located in upper Oklahoma. The tribe had been relocated from a reservation in Kansas to acreage they purchased from the Cherokee. Despite attempts to seize the land the tribe had managed to hold on to much of it, and to the mineral rights. When oil was discovered each enrolled tribal member was assigned what was known as 'headrights' to a portion of the oil lease money. Tribal members went from living in traditional lodges or shacks to building mansions and driving expensive automobiles. However murders of tribal members were not adequately investigated by either the local police or private detectives. Eventually the case was given to the FBI and despite many setbacks, including witnesses murdered, collaborators who retracted their testimony and bribed juries, three men were convicted of several murders.

The case was considered closed and the FBI congratulated on the success of its methods. Grann, however, researched other deaths within the tribe and believes that there were other killers and other murders. Suspiciously high numbers of Osage died, far exceeding the death rate for the rest of the nation. It is too late to solve these crimes and Grann does not detail his suspicions against people no longer alive to defend themselves. However this is a sobering reminder that exploitation and outright killing of Native Americans did not end with the official end of Indian Wars. In fact, a similar situation seems to currently exist in Canada and the northern states of the US, with disappearances and murders of Native American women and girls left unsolved. The book has an extensive set of notes, a bibliography and illustrations. However it lacks an index, which is unfortunate. I also feel that it would be improved by a complete list of the victims, with their relations to one another and to the suspected killers and a chronology of the events.

Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann
Doubleday, New York, 2017

The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus
Antoine Faivre,
Translated by Joscelyn Godwin
Phanes Press, Grand Rapids MI, 1995
0933999526
TPB $18.95

This volume is a clear example of the difference between studying a subject and studying about a subject. It contains virtually no instruction in any of the hermetic arts, nor much information about the role of Hermes in Greek religion or of cult activities devoted to the god.

Faivre's subject is, instead, the history of the writings attributed to the god/mage who became known as Hermes Trismegistus and of the commentaries, discussions and publications devoted to those writings. In the early centuries of the Common era various writings supposed to contain wisdom dating to the ancient Egyptians were collected and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus together with various origin stories accounting for both the supposed author and the contents of the works. Since this was a time in which ancient pedigree was far more valued than any pretense at originality the works were given dates as far back in human history as the collectors of the myths could conceive. More recent scholarship dates such works as the Corpus Hermeticum to the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE.

Faivre traces the evolution of ideas about these works, publication and translations of the works themselves and their role in the history of magical thought in the West. As an example of the esteem the works were held in by some he cites the priorities of Cosimo de' Medici, who had his court translator delay work on Plato to translate the newly rediscovered Corpus into Latin. With this and other hermetic works returned to circulation among the learned classes the ideas they contained worked their way into the pictorial arts and into subsequent occult societies, such as the Rosicrucians and the various Masonic Lodges.

One chapter of this book is comprised of black and white plates reproducing paintings and prints which contain images of Hermes Trismegistus as imagined by various generations. Unfortunately some of these plates are not very clear in their detail, possibly from having been reduced from much larger formats It would also have been helpful for the extensive discussion of the details and symbolism of the plates to have been printed next the work described rather than in a separate chapter.

The greatest part of the work consists of references to other works, an extensive list of works about hermeticism published through the ages, including books and articles. This is the sort of work that can serve as a springboard for further research.

High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved my Life on Death Row
Damien Echols
Sounds True, Boulder Co, 2018
9781683641346

For centuries ceremonial or ritual magic has been the confined to the upper ranges of society. The books describing the practices were expensive in the era before printing and dangerous to own for centuries after because of religious suspicion of magic. Only recently have texts describing the mental exercises that constitute ritual magic become available in mass market editions and in forms written for the average reader.

However High Magick is not an ordinary rehashing of information available in other sources. Damien Echols spent over 18 years on death row in Arkansas state prisons and taught himself magic from books. He credits his practices with keeping him alive as his appeals slowly made their way through the system. He presents magic as a practical way to link with universal spirit and to shield oneself from negative energy. Needless to say, a cell in death row is probably the most negative environment society has.

The information in High Magick can be found in many other books. However the sheer passion of the author seems to lend a different dimension to his instructions.

The material includes instruction in mental focus and visualization as well as basic meditation, the four-fold breath and methods of raising energy. Echols includes clear step by step instructions for the middle pillar exercise, the Qabalistic cross and the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram. Comments on his life and experiences and general advice are interspersed with more traditional instruction. This is not an impersonal guide to an esoteric subject; it is a personal introduction both to the art and to its results.