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The Game of Wizards: Roots of Consciousness & the Esoteric Arts
Shows how both astrology and the I Ching correspond to Jungian psychology.
179 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 29, 2014
It surprises me that none of my friends have reviewed this book yet! I discovered it quite by accident, but in this book, Ponce proposes the idea that magick is simply a way of mapping the complex psyche of the human mind, giving the symbolism used in magick a universal application, particularly in the field of Jungian psychology. For those who enjoy a study of Jungian psychology, or magickal practitioners who (like me) believe that magick is really all about schooling the conscious and subconscious mind, thus changing our reality by a combination of affecting outlook and expectation, this is an essential that is well worth your time. I reference it in my own book, The Witch's Eight Paths of Power, and I highly recommend it.
May 7, 2026
THE GAME OF WIZARDS
A great intro to Magick if you know how to Think. Really gets the ball rolling on getting you to think about different types of esoteric systems and what they have in common, reducing these commonalities together to make some inferred guesses about the human psyche and unconscious mind.
I found some parts of the book a bit strange, taking a random man's schizophrenic episode for seemingly no reason other than that the author found it interesting and trying to link it to the alchemical process of spiritual death was certainly a choice. The chapter on tarot also left me wanting a bit, but the book made up for it with otherwise excellent summaries of Kabbalah and Alchemy.
The overall message of the book is that "There is an unconscious ordering principle of the mind which emerges in every culture through their esoteric systems" which is very interesting to me. This ordering principle is brought forth by imagination, and it's even proposed to be supra-rational, ie able to reach conclusions that logical trains of thought could not. In other words, this power of the imagination is the basis of all magick, and the esoteric systems are an attempt to teach the initiate how to harness their own imagination, and what the journey might look like.
Someone a little bit more skeptic or learned probably won't get as much out of this book, a lot of its claims don't really match up with history all that much. Particularly the claims on the symbols for Tarot being from the old city of Alexandria in Egypt, which is something that sounds really cool but I can't verify anywhere. Likewise, these shared ordering principles between cultures might have more to do with a common anthropological origin than something programmed into the human mind, like a "Proto-Indo-European" language of spirituality.
Still, I found the book very entertaining and useful for my own esoteric studies! Definitely worth a read if not only for the easy explanation and summary of a lot of otherwise confusing esoteric systems, and the emphasis on the importance of the unconscious. A lot of modern psychology tries to make the unconscious seem scary, which is the complete opposite of what a lot of these spiritual practices said, that the unconscious is a sacred thing that can assist the conscious mind if you know it well.
In my opinion, that's got a lot to do with the way that we repress things today. I imagine that offloading bad things onto the unconscious mind probably isn't good for it. The whole book sort of edges toward this ancient idea of two cults of reasoning: The "Solar Cult of Logic" that relies on the conscious mind and making rational, ego-driven decisions, and the "Lunar Cult of Intuition" which relies on the unconscious mind and making intuitive, emotion-based decisions. It seems like the Solar Cult won out a long, long time ago, but the remnants of the Lunar Cult are still there in our minds... should we choose to access it.
And if someone were to embody the eclipse in their own mind? I think that would be Self-Actualization.
Finally, he brings up a really good point at the end about parapsychology, and how skeptics have a significantly larger amount of "psi-misses" in tests when compared to the average population. Ahhhhh it's so interesting, why couldn't he write a book on that!!!!
Needless to say it's a worthwhile read. I hope I've convinced you!
A great intro to Magick if you know how to Think. Really gets the ball rolling on getting you to think about different types of esoteric systems and what they have in common, reducing these commonalities together to make some inferred guesses about the human psyche and unconscious mind.
I found some parts of the book a bit strange, taking a random man's schizophrenic episode for seemingly no reason other than that the author found it interesting and trying to link it to the alchemical process of spiritual death was certainly a choice. The chapter on tarot also left me wanting a bit, but the book made up for it with otherwise excellent summaries of Kabbalah and Alchemy.
The overall message of the book is that "There is an unconscious ordering principle of the mind which emerges in every culture through their esoteric systems" which is very interesting to me. This ordering principle is brought forth by imagination, and it's even proposed to be supra-rational, ie able to reach conclusions that logical trains of thought could not. In other words, this power of the imagination is the basis of all magick, and the esoteric systems are an attempt to teach the initiate how to harness their own imagination, and what the journey might look like.
Someone a little bit more skeptic or learned probably won't get as much out of this book, a lot of its claims don't really match up with history all that much. Particularly the claims on the symbols for Tarot being from the old city of Alexandria in Egypt, which is something that sounds really cool but I can't verify anywhere. Likewise, these shared ordering principles between cultures might have more to do with a common anthropological origin than something programmed into the human mind, like a "Proto-Indo-European" language of spirituality.
Still, I found the book very entertaining and useful for my own esoteric studies! Definitely worth a read if not only for the easy explanation and summary of a lot of otherwise confusing esoteric systems, and the emphasis on the importance of the unconscious. A lot of modern psychology tries to make the unconscious seem scary, which is the complete opposite of what a lot of these spiritual practices said, that the unconscious is a sacred thing that can assist the conscious mind if you know it well.
In my opinion, that's got a lot to do with the way that we repress things today. I imagine that offloading bad things onto the unconscious mind probably isn't good for it. The whole book sort of edges toward this ancient idea of two cults of reasoning: The "Solar Cult of Logic" that relies on the conscious mind and making rational, ego-driven decisions, and the "Lunar Cult of Intuition" which relies on the unconscious mind and making intuitive, emotion-based decisions. It seems like the Solar Cult won out a long, long time ago, but the remnants of the Lunar Cult are still there in our minds... should we choose to access it.
And if someone were to embody the eclipse in their own mind? I think that would be Self-Actualization.
Finally, he brings up a really good point at the end about parapsychology, and how skeptics have a significantly larger amount of "psi-misses" in tests when compared to the average population. Ahhhhh it's so interesting, why couldn't he write a book on that!!!!
Needless to say it's a worthwhile read. I hope I've convinced you!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews