The Final Draft of Book 6 is Done
The final draft of The Magical Art, Volume 2 is finished. It has been submitted to Erzebet Barthold of Hadean Press for initial review, and shared with a handful of readers whose judgment I trust. The book is subtitled The Seven Pillars of Magical Wisdom and it has turned out to be a far more comprehensive book than I originally envisioned. Roughly 131,000 words across some 609 pages, although that will compress in the publishing process. There is extensive introductory and interpretive material that I had originally imagined as a short essay and which quietly became several chapters, and over 500 footnotes, with five pages of bibliography and reference material
The subtitle is partly homage. T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom has been a companion of mine for years, and his title was itself second-hand — borrowed from Proverbs 9:1, “Wisdom hath builded a house: she hath hewn out her seven pillars,” and shaped by Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ruskin’s seven principles were not a ladder of degrees and not a hierarchy of merit; they were seven distinct considerations, of quite different orders, which the architect must satisfy at once. Together they constitute an art.
I have used this structure for the text. The material at the heart of this volume falls into seven parts, and each of them teaches a different kind of magic, the spirit art. To work through it from end to end is to change roles repeatedly — supplicant, celebrant, devotee, astrologer, metalworker, conjuror, natural philosopher. These are not variations on one practice. They are different practices, drawn from different centuries and different languages, and the ambition beneath them is that the spirit worker holds them all through the process of magical learning and practice.
Like pillars that stand apart and yet bear the load of a single roof, these practices constitute a discipline of personal and universal hermetic evolution.
This will be my sixth published book — my seventh, really, since The Song of Oberon is also finished and with Hadean Press. I’ll have more to say about Volume 2 as it moves through production.
Subscribe if you’d like to hear more as it becomes available and for my occasional articles on diverse themes.
— Aaman
Also by Aaman Lamba — available here: The Complete Illustrated Grand Grimoire, or The Red Dragon · Great French Occult Romances · The Odontiad & Other Poems · Unseen In the Crowd: A Novella · The Magical Art, Volume I