This might be an upgrade into more coherent thinking for some people. It was certainly more coherent than books I read on the subject in the 90s…

…but don’t let the audio sample fool you. This is not an obvious example of someone sitting down to practically assess what magic can and cannot do for you. To give an example, the author gives you a “practical spell” in the “regular practice” section a spell which summons and then compels something like the original universal god to then compel all spirits from all the earth and space and elsewhere to obey your whims. The language then changes mid-spell to where now YOU ARE THE GOD OF THE UNIVERSE AND ALL POWER GOES THROUGH YOU.

Dude. Most people turn to magic because they want a raise or they want their coworkers to be nice to them, or to know if they’ll get the new job, or maybe a pregnancy, or not to be alone, or they want something the television told them they wanted.

If one could summon the original creator spirit and compel it to do one’s bidding, you would think that someone would well… do it. Like, there are world leaders out there individually worth hundreds of millions of dollars and all the power of the state architecture who lead tortured lives. You would think one of them would say… use the POWER OF ALL CREATION AND THE TRUE CREATOR GOD to perhaps… keep their parliamentary coalition together. Or stop their taxes from getting audited. Or bring peace and prosperity to their nation. Or plagues to their enemies. Or keep malaria out.

And if the world leaders were too busy to understand magic, then perhaps YOU (after reading this book) could use the “practical” spells to say… win the lottery… bring peace and comfort to the millions of hungry… drive a million dollar car… bring plagues or hexes to warlords and war criminals. Or become a world leader without all the work that most of them put into it.

Incidentally, there is abundant talk of spirits in the book. What would the spirits want from us? They want libations? Why? To better intervene in human affairs? The author is (perhaps unwittingly) asking us to play politics in the spirit world. What if you offer libations to the nature spirits and your neighbor offers libations to the money spirits so that a park will or will not get paved over for a new bank that raises property prices? Do the spirits of the other side become partisan when one or the other side loses?

To paraphrase one philosopher: “Never invoke the spirits unless you very, very much want them to appear. For it annoys them very much.“

Incidentally, I’ve traveled enough to see countries where traditional libations and spirit appeasement are common. They are not rich or lucky countries.

I bought a book about practically exploring what we know about magic. I returned a book about an author writing what he thinks his audience wants to hear.