Ani.Mystic

by Gordon White

Gordon White's sequel to his acclaimed Star.Ships is a book of adventure and encounter, of optimism and healing. Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos is, explicitly, a magician's book, a dreaming book, one which aims to fundamentally shift the discourse within the western magical tradition. Gordon explains, 'the sole preoccupation of this book is exploring and uncovering animism as a dangerous category of European thought...' Gordon begins by giving the standard definition of animism as 'the belief that the world is made up of persons, only some of whom are humans,' before taking us with him 'to its farthest epistemological hinterlands.' In dialogue with teachers of Indigenous knowledge, spirits, angels, star people, saints, plants, and beast masters and mothers, Gordon weaves a new story of trans-species collaboration and custodianship. To get to that point, he interrogates and dismantles a series of constructs: materialist-naturalism, the notion of invasive species, the nature-culture divide and the binaries of domestic vs wild and forest vs garden, and the concept of 'animism' itself. We are then shown what it means to think with Deep Time, with Country and in Ceremony. Solutions and best practice are drawn from dialogue with the cultures he partakes in and the disciplines of magic and permaculture. Our journey begins in an airport hotel bar in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and the story unfolds through encounters with forest spirits, shark gods and cities of the dead. From stone altars in Micronesia, ancestral Maori pa, and Aboriginal songlines to lecturing on UFOs at the Guggenheim in New York and avenging angels in London, the journey gathers momentum. We experience songlines, fire storms and rain dragons in Tasmania, and are finally brought into ceremony with Ayahuasca in Peru. Gordon is transformed through his encounters with a living cosmos, and in the Telling. In walking in the magician's footsteps, the candour of his heartbreaks and triumphs, we are invited to come into right relation ourselves, toward the cosmic aim of mutual flourishing.

Genres: Occult, Magic, Nonfiction, Magick, Mythology

280 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2022

About the author

Gordon White runs one of the world's leading chaos magic blogs and podcasts, Rune Soup. He has worked nationally and internationally for some of the world's largest digital and social media companies, including BBC Worldwide, Discovery Channel, and Yelp.

Gordon has presented at media events across Europe on social and data strategy as well as the changing behaviors and priorities of Generation Y. During this time, he has partied with princes, dined in castles, dived on sunken cities and even had a billionaire knight buy him bottles of champagne.

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the final chapter 'Everything Standing Up Alive,' however, much of the book left me a little underwhelmed.

Gordon White draws heavily from relational anthropology such as the works from Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, Eduardo Khon, etc...to frame his essays, this isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it did remind me that those people wrote books covering similar themes and ideas much better than White does.

I was hoping that Gordon's addition would be more pronounced into how those ideas should be adapted into 'Western" occult metaphysics and I believe he eventually gets there by the final chapter but it was a bit of a slog for me.

Being already familiar with much of the bibliography he is drawing from left me feeling like I was getting a cliff notes review on animism in recent literature with me for desiring more novel new ideas; however, I could see people who are not as familiar with those works getting more out of this than me.

[Angela Natividad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is gorgeous and gave me a richer vocabulary for living. For extra mind-bends, do read it alongside David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It's like they talk to each other.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most important magic book for a generation.

[Quinnan Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The physical copy feels like magic in your hands. Beautifully typeset, heavy quality paper it feels like a gift while you read it.

The book is in and of itself magic. It seeps out, wrapping you up in a big field of possibilities. Reading it in different locations plugs you into the magic that flows around you, gives you a sense of what is possible and how little most of us understand the world in which we inhabit. Eye opening, which I say as someone who is already pretty firmly in the animist camp, we all need all the reminders about how life the universe and everything could be, if we worked with it, rather than against.

[Simão Cortês · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has the potential to help redeem some of the worst features of Western Occultism. It is something else.

[Mark Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

As full of scintillating ideas as Star.Ships (ie. very very).

[Librarian Bee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, mind-opening, and sometimes overwhelming with information that has always made me curious. A must-buy for my home shelf.

[Nick Griffiths-Haynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a deeply thought provoking book with many sections exploring animistic world views and the limits (or not) of human understanding. It takes time to read and absorb many of the ideas within. However, some parts of the book stray too far into alternative conspiracies that take away from the central message on the importance of seeing ourselves as a part of an interconnected living vibrant network of ever changing life.